An efficient multipath structure for concurrent data transport in wireless mesh networks

Multipath routing is employed extensively in wireless mesh networks for fault tolerance, throughput enhancement, and load balancing purposes. Most existing multipath routing methods tend to establish link-disjoint or node-disjoint paths with minimal path costs. As paths created by these methods are typically close to each other, they may cause serious inter-path interference when serving for concurrent data transmissions. In this paper, we first introduce an AODV-based decoupled multipath routing protocol named AODV-DM. AODV-DM builds an insulating region around each established path to prevent new paths from being formed in the neighborhood of the established path. Multiple paths formed by this means are “isolated” from each other; thereby they are very suitable to serve for concurrent data transmissions. We also investigate the transport-layer route-coupling problem, and conclude that a path-aware SCTP scheme is a very good match to our AODV-DM protocol. The path-aware SCTP scheme enables the transport layer to make the most of the capacity provided by decoupled multipath. We simulate the AODV-DM protocol and integrate it with the path-aware SCTP protocol. The simulation results demonstrate that AODV-DM, combined with the path-aware SCTP, significantly boosts end-to-end throughput of multihop data transmissions. This decoupled multipath structure is especially beneficial to concurrent transmissions of time-constraint data in wireless mesh networks.