European Journal of Scientific Research ISSN 1450-216X Vol.53 No.2 (2011), pp.222-230 EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2011 http://www.eurojournals.com/ejsr.

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Multipath Routing Backbone for Improving QoS in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

S. Soundararajan Corresponding Author, Ramanujan Computing Centre College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, India E-mail: [email protected] R. S. Bhuvaneswaran Ramanujan Computing Centre, College of Engineering, Guindy Anna University, Chennai, India E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are infrastructure less networks, dynamically formed by an autonomous system of mobile nodes that are connected via wireless links. The routers are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily; thus, the network's wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. In these kinds of networks provisioning QoS based services is a challenging task. This paper presents a new approach based on multipath routing backbones (MRB) for supporting enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs. The objective of this multipath routing is to improve the reliability and throughput and favour load balancing. In this approach, initially multiple loop-free and link disjoint paths are computed and then a mobile routing backbone (MRB) is created based on the characteristics of mobile nodes in the network. Simulation results show that our proposed approach has better packet delivery ratio and reduced delay, compared with the single path QoS routing schemes.

Keywords: Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET), Quality of Service (QoS), Multipath routing, Multipath Routing Backbones (MRB), Bandwidth, Load Balancing

1. Introduction
1.1. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are infrastructure-less networks, dynamically formed by an independent system of mobile nodes that are connected via wireless links [1]. Mobile wireless networks are receiving an increasing interest due to the possibility of ubiquitous communications they offer. In particular, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) enable users to maintain connectivity to the fixed network or exchange information when no infrastructure, such as a base station or an access point, is available [2]. 1.2. QoS Routing "Quality of Servicethe collective effect of service performance which determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service". The provisioning of QoS based network services is in general

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terms an extremely complex problem, and a significant part of this complexity lies in the routing layer [5]. The goals of QoS routing are twofold: selecting paths that can satisfy given QoS requirements of arriving communication requests, and achieving global efficiency in resource utilization [7]. The following issues were addressed in QOS routing. Dynamically varying network topology: Since the nodes in an ad hoc wireless network do not have any restriction on mobility, the network topology changes dynamically. Hence the admitted QoS sessions may suffer due to frequent path breaks, thereby requiring such sessions to be re-established over new paths. Imprecise state information: The state information is inherently imprecise due to dynamic changes in network topology and channel characteristics. Hence routing decisions may not be accurate, resulting in some of the real-time packets missing their deadlines. Lack of central coordination: Unlike wireless LANs and cellular networks, AWNs do not have central controllers to coordinate the activity of nodes. This further complicates QoS provisioning in AWNs. Error prone shared radio channel: During propagation through the wireless medium the radio waves suffer from several impairments such as attenuation, multi-path propagation, and interference (from other wireless devices operating in the vicinity). Hidden terminal problem: This problem occurs when packets originating from two or more sender nodes, which are not within the direct transmission range of each other, collide at a common receiver node. Limited resource availability: Resources such as bandwidth, battery life, storage space, and processing capability are limited in AWNs. Insecure medium: Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, communication through a wireless channel is highly insecure. [4][8][9]. 1.3. Need for Multipath Routing In case of the route failure, this single-path routing protocol initiates again another route discovery which put a massive load on the network. Single route to destination node increases the probability of a malicious node existence in discovered path [13].Single Path protocols learn routes and select a single best route to each destination. These protocols are incapable of load balancing traffic. Multi-path protocols learn routes and can select more than one path to a destination. These protocols are better for performing load balancing [14].Single-path inter-networks are not fault tolerant. Multipath internetworks are fault tolerant when dynamic routing is used [15].Also single path routing is less efficient in bandwidth aggregation and reduced delay when compared to mutipath routing [16]. Multipath routing allows the establishment of multiple paths between a pair of source and destination node. It is typically proposed in order to increase the reliability of data transmission or to provide load balancing and has received more and more attentions [3]. In [6], Gabriel Ioan Ivascu et al, presented a new approach based on a mobile routing backbone for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs. In real-life MANETs, nodes will possess different communication capabilities and processing characteristics. Hence, they aimed to identify those nodes whose capabilities and characteristics will enable them to take part in the mobile routing backbone and efficiently participate in the routing process. Moreover, the route discovery mechanism we developed for the mobile routing backbone dynamically distributes traffic within the network according to current network traffic levels and nodes processing loads. Simulation results showed that their solution improved network throughput and packet delivery ratio by directing traffic through lowly congested regions of the network that are rich in resources. Moreover, their protocol incurs lower communication overheads than AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol) when searching for routes in the network [6]. But this scheme is operated on single path. If the multipath routing is used, it will improve the reliability and throughput and favour load balancing. So, in this paper, we tend to extend this scheme over multipath routing protocol.

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The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related work done on QoS and multipath routing for MANETs. In Section 3, the multipath routing protocol is described. Section 4 presents the construction of mobile routing backbones. The simulation results are given in Section 5 and the paper is concluded in Section 6.

2. Related Work
Yan Chen et.al, presented quality of service (QoS) metrics for various network applications based on human factors and technology attributes. The first term, human factors, addresses human perception of different kinds of media, such as conventional text, audio and video. The second term, technology attributes, represented the different technological aspects of these network applications, such as timedependence and symmetry. Both of these terms were the key factors that lead to variations of requirements for QoS. Establishing these requirements is paramount to providing QoS on computer networks and the Internet. With the metrics presented in the proposed paper they provided the criteria necessary for such QoS assurance [10]. Zheng Wang and Jon Crowcroft proposed a number of issues in QoS routing. They first examined the basic problem of QoS routing, namely, finding a path that satisfy multiple constraints, and its implications on routing metric selection, and then presented three path computation algorithms for source routing and for hop-by-hop routing [11]. Gautam Chakrabarti and Sandeep Kulkarni modified the way these alternate routes are maintained and used in DSR, and showed that these modifications permit more efficient route discovery when nodes move and/or fail. Their routing protocol also does load balancing among the number of alternate routes that are available. Their simulation results showed that maintenance of these alternate routes (without affecting the route cache size at each router) increases the packet delivery ratio. They also showed that their approach enabled them to provide QoS guarantees by ensuring that appropriate bandwidth will be available for a flow even when nodes moved. Towards the end, they showed how reservations can be made on the alternate routes while maximizing the bandwidth usage in situations where nodes do not move. They also showed how the load of the traffic generated due to node movement is shared among several alternate routes. In addition, they adaptively used Forward Error Correction techniques with their protocol and showed how it can improve the packet delivery ratio [12]. Sung-Ju Lee and Mario Gerla proposed a scheme to improve existing on-demand routing protocols by creating a mesh and providing multiple alternate routes. The algorithm established the mesh and multipaths without transmitting any extra control message. The proposed scheme was been applied to the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol and evaluated the performance improvements by simulation. Lei Wang et.al, proposed a new multipath routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks Multipath Source Routing (MSR), which is an extension of DSR (Dynamic Source Routing). Based on the measurement of RTT, they proposed a scheme to distribute load among multiple paths. The simulation results showed that our approach improved the packet delivery ratio and the throughput of TCP and UDP, and reduced the end-to-end delay and the average queue size, while adding little overhead. As a result, MSR decreases the network congestion and increases the path fault tolerance quite well. Hui-Yao An et al, proposed A Cluster-Based Multipath Dynamic Source Routing in MANET (CMDSR) that is designed to be adaptive according to network dynamics. It uses the hierarchy to perform Route Discovery and distributes traffic among diverse multiple paths. The CMDSR is based on a 2-level hierarchical scheme: the 1-cell cluster and 2-server cluster. The main idea of their proposition is to transfer the Route Discovery procedure to the 2-server level to prevent the network flooding due to the DSR Route Discovery. Thus, Route Discovery does not require flooding mechanism and overhead is minimized and improve the networks scalability.

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Lee, S.-J and Gerla, M. proposed a scheme to improve existing on-demand routing protocols by creating a mesh and providing multiple alternate routes. Our algorithm establishes the mesh and multipaths without transmitting any extra control message. They applied their scheme to the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol and evaluate the performance improvements by simulation.

3. Proposed Multipath QoS Routing Protocol

Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) [17] routing protocol is used to compute multiple paths during route discovery. It is designed primarily for highly dynamic ad hoc networks where link failures and route breaks occur frequently. When single path on-demand routing protocol such as AODV is used in such networks, a new route discovery is needed in response to every route break. Each Route discovery is associated with high overhead and Latency. This inefficiency can be avoided by having multiple redundant paths available. Now, a new route discovery is needed only when all paths to the destination break. The AOMDV protocol has two main components. 1. A route update rule to establish and maintain multiple loop-free paths at each node. 2. A distributed protocol to find link-disjoint paths. 3.1. Computing Multiple Loop-Free, Link Disjoint Paths We use the same approach of AOMDV protocol for finding multiple loop-free paths from source to destination. AOMDV is essentially using the same route request (RREQ) and route reply (RREP) mechanism used in AODV for route discovery. Each copy of the RREQ packet arriving at a node actually defines an alternate path back to the source. In order to eliminate any possibility of loops, AOMDV uses the notion of an advertised hop-count. The advertised hop-count of a node i for a destination d represents the maximum hop-count of the multiple paths for d available at i . Maximum hop-count is considered, as then the advertised hop-count can never change for the same sequence number. The protocol only allows accepting alternate routes with lower hop counts. This guarantees loop freedom. In AOMDV, advertised hop-count replaces hop-count in AODV and route list replaces the next hop and essentially defines multiple next hops with respective hop-counts. However all next hops still have the same destination sequence number. The advertisement hop-count is initialized each time the sequence number is updated. advertised _ hopcount id := max k {hopcount k | ( nexthop k , hopcount k ) route _ list id } (1) The route update rule is invoked whenever a node receives a route advertisement. Similar to AODV, the following conditions holds well for two successive nodes i and j on any valid route to destination d . ( seqnumid , advertisement _ hopcount id , j ) > ( seqnum d , advertised _ hopcount d , j ) j j AOMDV also ensures link-disjointness of the multiple paths created by using a particular property of flooding. . 3.2. Finding Link-disjoint Paths The above mechanism establishes multiple loop free paths at every node. Here, we explore how we can make these paths disjoint. Path disjointness has the nice property that paths fail independently. There are two types of disjoint paths: node-disjoint and link disjoint. Node disjoint paths do not have any nodes in common, except the source and destination. In contrast, link disjoint paths do not have any common link. Note that link-disjoint paths may have common nodes. They have investigated the issue of node vs.link-disjointness carefully. Generally speaking, using link- disjointness is fine as long as links do fail independently. This is often the case, except in

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situations where multiple links from/to a node fail together as the node moves out of range. Of course, node- disjointness actually guarantees that links fail independently. However, node - disjointness is a much stricker condition than link - disjointness and thus presents a much lesser number of disjoined routes in the simulations we have run. This makes node-disjointness less effective. Thus, we stick to link-disjointness routes here.

4. Establishment of Mobile Routing Backbones

The routing metrics and approach as used in single path QMRB-AODV [6] protocol is employed for setting up MRBs in our approach. In QMRB-AODV approach, a mobile routing backbone (MRB) is created based on the characteristics of mobile nodes in the network. Paths connecting source and destination nodes are found on this MRB. Four QoS support metrics (QSMs) namely; static resources capacity (SRC), dynamic resources availability (DRA), neighbourhood quality (NQ) and Link quality and stability (LQS) are used to differentiate nodes in the network based on their characteristics and identify the ones that can take part in the MRB set up. The dissemination of information required to support QoS is done using the HELLO messages defined by the AODV protocol and exchanged periodically by neighboring nodes. Each mobile node broadcasts a HELLO message containing the nodes SRC, DRA, NQ and its available bandwidth (BW) to all its neighbors when the HELLO_INTERVAL expires. Note that this information is computed by the sending node. Node classification based on routing capabilities is realized by first computing its aptitude to play a specific role in the MRB: (2) MN aptitude = SRC + DRA + NQ + LQS + BW where , , , , are coefficients associated, respectively, with a nodes static resource capacity, dynamic resource availability, neighborhood quality, Link quality and stability and bandwidth in such a way that their sum equals 1. Our algorithm finds multiple disjoint paths from source to destination using AOMDV routing protocol, where each path so constructed will satisfy the conditions of MRB-AODV so that such paths will be MRBs instead of simple routing paths. In contrast to the single path MRB-AODV, this multipath approach can select multiple paths with high MRB routing metric. The path with highest routing metric is selected as the primary path and data transmission takes place though this path. In case of route failures or breakage, the secondary path with next highest metric can be selected. This avoids the route rediscovery process of single path routing thus reducing the overhead.

5. Simulation Results
5.1. Simulation Settings We use NS2 to simulate our proposed algorithm. In our simulation, the channel capacity of mobile hosts is set to the same value: 2 Mbps. We use the distributed coordination function (DCF) of IEEE 802.11 for wireless LANs as the MAC layer protocol. It has the functionality to notify the network layer about link breakage. In our simulation, the number of nodes is varied as 30, 50, 70, 90 and 110. The mobile nodes move in a 1250 meter x 1250 meter square region for 50 seconds simulation time. We assume each node moves independently with the same average speed. All nodes have the same transmission range of 250 meters. In our simulation, the speed is varied from 10 m/s to 40m/s. Random Way Point mobility model is used. The simulated traffic is Constant Bit Rate (CBR). Our simulation settings and parameters are summarized in table 1.

Multipath Routing Backbone for Improving QOS in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Table 1: Simulation parameters
30, 50, 70, 90 & 110 1250 X 1250 802.11 250m 50 sec CBR 250kb/s 512 B Random Way Point 10, 20, 30 & 40 m/s 5 seconds

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No. of Nodes Area Mac Radio Range Simulation Time Traffic Source Rate Packet Size Mobility Model Speed Pause time

5.2. Performance Parameters We evaluate performance of the new protocol mainly according to the following parameters. We compare the QMRB routing protocol with single path QMRB-AODV [6] and AOMDV protocols. Control overhead: The control overhead is defined as the total number of routing control packets normalized by the total number of received data packets. Average end-to-end delay: The end-to-end-delay is averaged over all surviving data packets from the sources to the destinations. Average Packet Delivery Ratio: It is the ratio of the number of packets received successfully and the total number of packets transmitted. The simulation results are presented in the next section. 5.3. Results 5.3.1. Effect of Varying Number of Nodes Initially we vary the number of nodes as 30, 50, 70, 90 and 110.
Figure 1: Nodes Vs Delay

Nodes Vs D elay
6 5 4 3 2 1 0 30 50 70 Node s 90 110

Delay(S ec )

A O MDV QMR B QM-A O DV

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Figure 2: Nodes Vs Delratio
Nodes Vs D elratio
1.5 Delratio 1 A O MDV 0.5 0 30 50 70 Node s 90 110 QMR B QM-A O DV

Figure 3: Nodes Vs Overhead

Nodes Vs Overhead
20000 Overhead 15000 10000 5000 0 30 50 70 Node s 90 110 A O MDV QMR B QM-A O DV

Figure 1 shows the results of average end-to-end delay for the increasing number of nodes. From the results, we can see that QMRB multipath scheme has significantly lower delay than the other two schemes. As expected, the end-to-end delay performance of MP-QMRB is almost similar to other two schemes at lower node density, but much better as the node density increases. In Figure 2 the results of average packet delivery ratio clearly indicates that our multipath QMRB scheme achieves better delivery ratio than other two schemes. Figure 3 illustrates the results of routing overhead Vs number of nodes. From the results, we can see that multipath QMRB scheme produces less routing overhead than the other schemes since it does not involve frequent route re-discovery routines. 5.3.2. Effect of Varying Node Speed Next, we vary the node movement speed as 10, 20, 30 and 40 m/s.
Figure 4: Speed Vs Delay
S p eed V s D elay
20 Delay(S ec) 15 10 5 0 10 20 30 40 A O MDV Q MR B Q M-A O DV

S pe e d

Multipath Routing Backbone for Improving QOS in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Figure 5: Speed Vs Delratio

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S peed Vs D elivery ratio

1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 10 20 30 40

Delratio

A O MDV Q MR B Q M-A O DV

S pe e d

Figure 6: Speed Vs Overhead

S peed Vs Overhead
20000 Overhead 15000 10000 5000 0 10 20 30 40 A O MDV QMR B QM-A O DV

S pe e d

If we look at the results of average end-to-end delay for various node speeds in Figure 4 we can see that QMRB multipath scheme has significantly lower delay than the other schemes AOMDV and QMRB-AODV. Figure 5 show the results of average packet delivery ratio for the varying speed scenario. Clearly our multipath QMRB scheme achieves better delivery ratio than the other two schemes. Figure 6 illustrates the results of routing overhead for the speed 10, 20.40. From the results, we can see that multipath QMRB scheme has marginally less routing overhead than QMRB-AODV, but almost same as AOMDV.

6. Conclusion
In this paper we have articulated several metrics that enable mobile routing backbone for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs from single path routing to mutipath routing. We have discussed the need of Multi path Routing compared with single path routing. We discussed the AOMDV protocol and about computing multiple loop-free and link disjoint paths. Finally we implemented our QMRBAOMDV routing scheme. The results show that our proposed approach has better packet delivery ratio and reduced delay, compared with the single path QoS routing schemes.

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