A reliable multipath routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks: Adapting techniques from interconnection networks

This paper illustrates how known methods and techniques for solving problems in the area of wired interconnection networks can be adapted to solve problems for wireless mobile networks. We make use of a known construction of disjoint paths in the k-ary n-cube interconnection network to design a reliable multipath routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). With the help of node positioning, node mobility is masked and the problem of routing between mobile nodes is transformed to a problem of routing between fixed cells of a logical 3-dimensional grid. Analytical performance evaluation results for the proposed protocol are obtained showing its high reliability. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed protocol is the first multipath source routing protocol for MANETs. We believe other wireless communication problems can be solved using a similar approach based on adapting solutions from wired interconnection networks.