Using Probabilistic Multipath Routing to Improve Route Stability in MANETs

Many MANET routing protocols do not perform well in dense scenarios with high network load. In these situations, we can observe a high level of route instability, which is often called "route flapping". In this paper we present the PRIME routing protocol, which uses a probabilistic multipath forwarding process to increase route stability in dense scenarios with high network load. We describe the routing protocol and propose different scenarios to evaluate the protocol performance. We compare the behavior of our protocol with the well-known OLSR and AODV protocols in those scenarios. The evaluation results show that the PRIME routing protocol does in fact have a positive impact on route stability and can improve the overall network performance in situations with high network load.