MCLMR: A Multicriteria Based Multipath Routing in the Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), nodes’ mobility, traffic congestion, and link quality estimation of the intermediate nodes are very crucial factors for establishing a reliable forwarding path between a source and destination node pairs. The unpredictable movement of nodes and random data traffic flow at a single node can cause congestion and network topology instability, which significantly lowers the performance of the ad hoc network. Indeed, the above-highlighted issues can be mitigated by implementing a more reliable mobility-centric, contention, and link quality-aware routing protocol for efficient data transmissions in a mobile network. This paper proposes a routing strategy called Mobility, Contention window, and Link quality sensitive multipath Routing (MCLMR) in MANETs, which considers the nodes mobility, contention window size, and link quality estimated value of the intermediate nodes in the optimal route selection. Also, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution; a multicriteria decision-making technique, which provides weights according to node mobility, contention window size, and link quality estimated values, is also employed for the selection of intermediate nodes, whereas the Expected Number of Transmissions metric is used to minimize the effect of control message storm. The extensive simulations results prove that the proposed MCLMR routing scheme outperforms the conventional Multipath Optimized Link State Routing (MP-OLSR) and MP-OLSRv2 routing schemes in terms of network throughput, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and packets loss ratio.