Abstract
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are wireless networks, which consist of mobile nodes that communicate over wireless media. MANETs are typically characterized by high mobility and frequent link failures. Since routing protocols are crucial for the success of MANETs, multipath routing can be employed to reduce link failure so that alternate paths will be available. This paper aims to develop and evaluate the performance of a new multipath routing protocol based on the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. It is an on-demand multipath routing protocol named ad hoc on-demand distance vector-secure multipath routing (AODV-SMR). The on-demand multipath routing protocol was evaluated against three performance metrics: packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing load. The simulation results, obtained using an OMNET++ simulator, showed that the proposed protocol exhibits significant improvement in the packet delivery ratio. It also outperformed the ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) protocol in the average end-to-end delay, and outperformed AODV in the normalized routing load metric.