Single path vs Multipath routing

Some protocols use a single route from source destination and other protocols will find multiple routes.There are several criteria for comparing single-path routing and multi-path routing in ad hoc networks.

First, the overhead of route discovery in multi-path routing is much more than that of single-path routing. On the other hand, the frequency of route discovery is much less in a network which uses multi-path routing, since the system can still operate even if one or a few of the multiple paths between a source and a destination fail.

Second, it is commonly believed that using multipath routing results in a higher throughput. The reason is that all nodes are assumed to have (and limited) capacity (bandwidth and processing power). Since multi-path routing distributes the load better, the overall throughput would be higher.