In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), packets are frequently lost or excessively delayed due to the failure of links and nodes, or the existence of bottlenecks along their routing paths. This often causes an outage or performance degradation for the clients. A mesh fashion topology of WMNs enables the capability to relieve this issue by using multi-path routing as a possible solution. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-path routing protocol that utilizes the mesh connectivity of WMNs in order to enhance the delay and reliability. The designed protocol discovers one primary path and multiple mini-paths between a source and a destination. Whilst the former connects the source to the destination, the latter connects pairs of intermediate nodes along the primary path. Multiple copies of packets are simultaneously routed through the mini-paths to compensate for possible outage at intermediate nodes along the primary path or their corresponding links. Routing along these mini-paths is performed in a way that redundant copies do not cause an excessive congestion on the network. The designed protocol is specifically advantageous for applications which are sensitive to delay and throughput. For evaluation, extensive simulation is carried out using the OMNET discrete event simulator and subsequent results validate the performance of our proposed protocol.
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