Roulette wheel based load balancing for multipath routing in manets

Abstract

The Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are networks with unpredictable topology. The number of paths existing between a pair of nodes may change with time. Thus, discovered routes are not permanent in nature and are subject to change with movement of nodes. The constraints like limited energy life of nodes also influence the availability of paths. The flows of traffic or data load also influence the performance of network. Thus, load needs to be distributed among various possible paths. This can prevent overutilization of resources. Thus, a proper management of available resources is necessary for routing data packets efficiently in MANETs. In this paper, a Roulette wheel based load balancing approach has been presented. Further this approach has been applied to Ant colony based Energy Efficient Multipath Routing (ACBEEMR). The combined approach has been named as ACBEEMR-LB. The performance of ACBEEMR-LB has been evaluated and analyzed using the NS2 simulator. The results corresponding to the load balanced approach has been compared to the results of simple ACBEEMR and protocols like AOMDV. The results so obtained prove the benefits of using Load Balancing in case of multipath routing.