In mobile ad hoc networks, most of on demand routing protocols such as DSR and AODV do not deal with traffic load during the route discovery procedure. To achieve load balancing in networks, many protocols have been proposed. However, existing load balancing schemes do not consider the remaining available buffer size of the interface queue, which still results in buffer overflows by congestion in a certain node which has the least available buffer size in the route. To solve this problem, we propose a load balancing protocol called Dynamic Congestion Aware Routing Protocol (DCAR) which monitors the remaining buffer length of all nodes in routes and excludes a certain congested node during the route discovery procedure. We also propose two buffer threshold values to select an optimal route selection metric between the traffic load and the minimum hop count. Through simulation study, we compare DCAR with other on demand routing protocols and show that the proposed protocol is more efficient when a network is heavily loaded.
