A multipath extension for the heterogeneous technology routing protocol

Abstract

In recent years we have witnessed the emergence of new access techniques that use both wireless technologies and self-organizing features. Their combination eliminates the need for using pre-defined wired structures and prior configurations. In this paper, we propose an extension by enabling multipath routing over our Heterogeneous Technologies Routing (HTR) Framework. HTR Multipath routing offers several benefits such as load balancing, fault tolerance, routing loop prevention, energy-conservation, low end-to-end delay, congestion avoidance, among others. This work performs a comparative analysis of the proposed HTR extension, with the baseline HTR, and the widely-used Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol. The evaluation is validated through the simulation of heterogeneous technologies such as WiMAX, 3GPP LTE and Wi-Fi. Results show that our proposal effectively improves the data delivery ratio and reduces the end-to-end delay without major impact on network energy consumption. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.