Abstract
Mobile ad hoc multipath routing protocols have attracted considerable research attention over the past decade, but the limited battery life of nodes remains a significant obstacle. Many researchers have designed multipath routing protocols that balance the data load between the generated paths, but there is always some tradeoff between conserving the nodes' energy and delivering data. In this paper, I introduce a load balancing ( LB) multipath routing protocol based on maximal minimal nodal residual energy ( MMRE) in the ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector ( AOMDV) protocol. The proposed LBMMRE-AOMDV protocol evaluates the generated paths based on the maximal nodal residual energy and the actual number of packets that could be transmitted over that path without depleting the nodes' energy. The performance of the proposed protocol was tested and evaluated using different scenarios and performance metrics, and achieved good results compared with MMRE-AOMDV and AOMDV. In particular, the proposed method can increase packet delivery and decrease the number of dead nodes, thus reducing the probability of network portioning.