Route selection in IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

This paper addresses the problem of route selection in IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Traditional routing protocols choose the shortest path between two routers. However, recent research reveals that there can be enormous differences between links in terms of quality (link loss ratio, interference, noise etc) and therefore selecting the shortest path (hop count metric) is a poor choice. We propose a novel routing metric—Expected Link Performance (ELP) metric for wireless mesh networks which takes into consideration multiple factors pertaining to quality (link loss ratio, link capacity and link interference) to select the best end-to-end route. Simulation based performance evaluation of ELP against contemporary routing metrics shows an improvement in terms of throughput and delay. Moreover, we propose an extension of the metric called ELP-Gateway Selection (ELP-GS) which is an extension meant for traffic specifically oriented towards the gateway nodes in the mesh network. We also propose a gateway discovery protocol which facilitates the dissemination of ELP-GS in the network. Simulation results for ELP-GS show substantial improvement in performance.     

Domain load balancing routing for multi-gateway wireless mesh networks

As Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are typically used for Internet access, most traffic is routed through the gateways which connect WMN to the wired network. As a result, the gateways tend to get congested and balancing of the traffic load of gateways is critical. In this paper, we consider applications that require continuous provision of a certain bandwidth to a server located at the wired network. If a path that satisfies the bandwidth request cannot be found, the request will be rejected, so that load imbalance will result underutilization of the network capacity. We present a novel load balancing routing algorithm for maximizing the network utilization (i.e., accommodating service requests as many as possible) for multi-gateway WMNs. In the proposed scheme, a WMN is divided into domains. Each domain is served by one gateway, so that all traffic of a domain is served by the corresponding gateway. Our scheme determines routing to balance the traffic load among domains, and then performs load balancing routing within each domain. Simulation results show that in square grid topologies, our intra-domain routing achieves near optimal performance with about 70% less overhead than the existing schemes. Our inter-domain load balancing scheme outperforms the existing heuristics by up to 25% while achieving about 80% performance of the optimal solution.     

GI/Geom/1 queue based on communication model for mesh networks

In mesh networks architecture, it should be permitted to visit the mobile client points. Whereas in mesh networks environment, the main throughput flows usually communicate with the conventional wired network. The so‐called gateway nodes can link directly to traditional Ethernet, depending on these mesh nodes, and can obtain access to data sources that are related to the Ethernet. In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), the quantities of gateways are limited. The packet‐processing ability of settled wireless nodes is limited. Consequently, throughput loads of mesh nodes highly affect the network performance. In this paper, we propose a queuing system that relied on traffic model for WMNs. On the basis of the intelligent adaptivenes, the model considers the influences of interference. Using this intelligent model, service stations with boundless capacity are defined as between gateway and common nodes based on the largest hop count from the gateways, whereas the other nodes are modeled as service stations with certain capacity. Afterwards, we analyze the network throughput, mean packet loss ratio, and packet delay on each hop node with the adaptive model proposed. Simulations show that the intelligent and adaptive model presented is precise in modeling the features of traffic loads in WMNs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient traffic control system using dynamic thresholding techniques in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) depend on a resilient and high‐performance infrastructure to provide users pervasive Internet access. In WMNs, all Internet traffic will be forwarded to the Internet gateways. Hence, these gateways are generally bottleneck nodes. This work proposes a traffic control technique to reduce the bottleneck problem and increase the utilization of network resources. Our approach provides a traffic control strategy that exploits dynamic techniques to adjust the threshold according to the traffic load of each gateway. The base threshold is defined in order to effectively control the traffic. When the current load exceeds the threshold of a gateway, the traffic redirection strategy is implemented by switching border nodes. The service regions can be adjusted for each gateway based on the traffic load. Furthermore, the proposed dynamic thresholding approaches can distribute the workloads of gateways and maintain the thresholds of any two gateways within a level range, making an in‐band balance of load. Thus, our proposed scheme can handle the unnecessary traffic redirection and reduce the traffic control overhead for various distributions of traffic. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio and efficiency, especially in bursty traffic environments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Routing metric of interference-aware link quality： an improved ETX in wireless mesh networks

This article addresses the problem of route selection in wireless mesh networks （WMNs）. The traditional routing metrics adopt packet delivery ratio （PDR） as a representative metric of wireless link quality assessment. However, PDR measured by the broadcast-based probe method is affected by the size, number and transmission rate of probe packets, which influences the metric accuracy. In this paper, improved expected transmission count （iETX）, a new routing metric of interference-aware link quality, is proposed for WMNs. Dispensing with traditional broadcast-based probing method, the iETX uses regional physical interference model to obtain PDR. Regional physical interference model is built upon the relationship between signal to interference plus noise ratio （SINR） and PDR, which contributes to the improvement of metric accuracy. The iETX comprehensively considers the effects of interference and link quality and minimizes the expected number of packet transmissions required for successful delivery, which helps find a path with minimum interference and high throughput. Simulation shows that the proposed metric can significantly improve the network performance.     

An adaptive load-aware routing algorithm for multi-interface wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks, the number of gateway nodes are limited, when the nodes access to the internet by fixed gateway node, different requirements of nodes lead to the dataflow shows heterogeneity. Many new routing metrics and algorithms existing in traditional wired networks and the Ad Hoc network, can not be directly applied to wireless mesh networks, so how to design a routing metric and algorithm which can dynamically adapt to current networks topology and dataflow changes, avoid bottleneck node, and select the most stable and least congestion link to establish a route is very important. In this paper, we presented a new dynamic adaptive channel load-aware metric (LAM) to solve the link load imbalance caused by inter-flow and inner-flow interference, designed a self-adaptive dynamic load balancing on-demand routing algorithm through extending and improving AODV routing method with the LAM, to achieve flow balance, reduce the high packet loss ratio and latency because congestion and Packet retransmission, and can increase Network Throughput.     

Multi-radio multi-channel routing metrics in IEEE 802.11s based wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.11s is one of the emerging standards designed to build wireless mesh networks which may serve to extend the coverage of access networks. The default IEEE 802.11s path selection protocol Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) is based on the radio-aware airtime link metric (ALM) that outperforms the hop-count metric in single channel multi-hop wireless networks. However, this metric may lead to capacity degradation when multiple channels and/or multi-radio are used. To fully exploit the capacity gain of multiple channels use, new routing metrics have been proposed such as weighted cumulative expected transmission time, metric of interference and channel switching, interference aware routing metric, exclusive expected transmission time, and normalized bottleneck link capacity. These metrics distribute the data traffic load among channels and/or radios to reach the final destination. In this paper, we provide a qualitative comparison study that considers the characteristics of these metrics. Indeed, we substitute ALM by these different metrics, and we evaluate the performance of HWMP through simulation. Obtained results allow us to identify the appropriate use case of each metric.     

无线Mesh网中基于信道感知的多径路由判据

无线Mesh网是一种新型的宽带无线接入网络,其中路由算法的设计是一个非常活跃的研究领域。WCETT路由判据仅适于单径路由协议,但是多路径路由能够提供负载平衡和较高的总带宽。为了提高网络性能,在综合考虑无线链路质量和信道间干扰的基础上,提出了一种新的多径路由判据CAM-WCETT。仿真结果表明,该方案能显著提高网络的吞吐量。     

Gateway load balancing using multiple QoS parameters in a hybrid MANET

A Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self configurable wireless network in which mobile nodes communicate with each other in a multihop fashion without any pre-installed infrastructure. A MANET can be considered to be a standalone network. To enhance the connectivity of a MANET it can be connected to the fixed network, thus forming a heterogeneous network. The integration of MANET and the Internet is called a hybrid MANET which is facilitated by special nodes called Internet gateway nodes. Load balancing among gateways is a challenging task when a MANET is connected to Internet. Gateway nodes with higher loads will lead to disconnected networks and depletes the node’s resources which include their batteries, memory and bandwidth quickly. Gateway selection based on the shortest path may increase traffic concentration on one particular gateway which leads to congestion and increases delay in the network. In this paper a QoS based load balancing mechanism has been proposed among multiple gateway nodes that provide communication between mobile nodes and fixed nodes in the Internet to select lightly loaded gateways so that more packets will be delivered to the fixed host in the Internet. The proposed QoS based scheme selects four QoS parameters that are (1) connecting degree, (2) interface queue length, (3) routing table entries and (4) hop count. A weight based method is used to select the gateway which combines all four QoS metrics. Simulation results demonstrate that when compared with individual parameter, the average ETE delay, queue size and traffic load of gateway generated by proposed algorithm is decreased by 17, 25 and 15 % respectively and when compared with existing schemes, the average ETE delay, queue size and traffic load of gateway is decreased by 25, 25 and 16 % respectively.     

On Routing in Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks: Challenges and Solutions

Wireless mesh networks have emerged as a promising solution to providing cost-effective last-mile connectivity. Employing multiple channels is shown to be an effective approach to overcoming the problem of capacity degradation in multihop wireless networks. However, existing routing schemes that are designed for single-channel multihop wireless networks may lead to inefficient routing paths in multichannel WMNs. To fully exploit the capacity gain due to multiple channels, one must consider the availability of multiple channels and distribute traffic load among channels as well as among nodes in routing algorithms. In this article we focus on the routing problem in multichannel WMNs. We highlight the challenges in designing routing algorithms for multichannel WMNs and examine existing routing metrics that are designed for multichannel WMNs, along with a simulation-based performance study. We also address some open research issues related to routing in multichannel WMNs.     

Responsive on-line gateway load-balancing for wireless mesh networks

We propose an adaptive online load-balancing protocol for multi-gateway Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) which, based on the current network conditions, balances load between gateways. Traffic is balanced at the TCP flow level and, as a result, the aggregate throughput, average flow throughput and fairness of flows improves. The proposed scheme (referred to as Gateway Load-Balancing, GWLB) is highly responsive, thanks to fast gateway selection and the fact that current traffic conditions are maintained up-to-date at all times without any overhead. It also effectively takes into account intra-flow and inter-flow interference when switching flows between gateway domains. We have found the performance achievable by routes used after gateway selection to be very close to the performance of optimal routes found by solving a MINLP formulation under the protocol model of interference. Through simulations, we analyze performance and compare with a number of proposed strategies, showing that GWLB outperforms them. In particular, we have observed average flow throughput gains of 128% over the nearest gateway strategy.     

Design and Performance Evaluation of IAR: Interference-Aware Routing Metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks are an attractive solution for providing last-mile connectivity. However, the shared nature of the transmission medium makes it challenging to fully exploit these networks. In an attempt to improve the radio resource utilization, several routing metrics have been specifically designed for wireless mesh networks. However none of these routing metrics efficiently tackles interference issues. Moreover, although some evaluations have been conducted to assess the performance of these metrics in some contrived scenarios, no overall comparison has been performed. The contributions of this paper are consequently twofold. First, we propose a new routing metric, Interference-Aware Routing metric (IAR), specifically designed for WMNs. IAR uses MAC-level information to measure the share of the channel that each link is able to utilize effectively. As a result, paths that exhibit the least interference will be selected to route the data traffic. Then we evaluate the performance of IAR against some of the most popular routing metrics currently used in wireless mesh networks: Hop Count, Blocking Metric, Expected Transmission Count (ETX), Expected Transmission Time (ETT), Modified ETX (mETX), Network Allocation Vector Count (NAVC) and Metric of Interference and Channel-Switching (MIC). We show under various simulation scenarios that IAR performs the best in terms of end-to-end delay and packet loss, and provides the fairest resource utilization.     

Stable‐path multi‐channel routing with extended level channel assignment

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have gained considerable popularity in recent times thanks to their self‐healing, self‐organizing, and self‐configuring nature. Because of their ability to provide high throughput and minimum packet delay, WMNs are considered to be favorable for broadband applications. For such applications, WMNs employ multiple channels, which give rise to issues like channel assignment, load balancing, and interference avoidance. Most of these issues fall into two broad categories, namely routing and channel assignment. For routing, we propose a novel proactive protocol, the stable‐path multi‐channel routing protocol (SMRP). Our proposed solution, to address channel assignment, is the extended level‐based channel assignment (ELCA) scheme. SMRP is designed to work in combination with ELCA in order to minimize interference and balance the load among the underlying nodes. Simulation results show enhanced throughput and minimal packet delay as compared with the contemporary schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐layer optimization for CDMA/TDD wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a new cross‐layer optimization algorithm for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). CDMA/TDD (code division multiple access/time division duplex) is utilized and a couple of TDD timeslot scheduling schemes are proposed for the mesh network backbone. Cross‐layer optimization involves simultaneous consideration of the signal to interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) at the physical layer, traffic load estimation and allocation at medium access control (MAC) layer, and routing decision at the network layer. Adaptive antennas are utilized by the wireless mesh routers to take advantage of directional beamforming. The optimization formulation is subject to routing constraints and can be solved by general nonlinear optimization techniques. Comparisons are made with respect to the classic shortest‐path routing algorithm in the network layer. The results reveal that the average end‐to‐end successful packet rate (SPR) can be significantly improved by the cross‐layer approach. The corresponding optimized routing decisions are able to reduce the traffic congestion. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed potential field based routing and autonomous load balancing for wireless mesh networks

Congested hot spots and node failures severely degrade the performance of wireless mesh networks. However, conventional routing schemes are inefficient in mitigation of the problems. Considering analogy to physics, we propose a novel distributed potential-field-based routing scheme for anycast wireless mesh networks, which is robust to sudden traffic and network perturbations, effectively balancing load among multiple gateways and mesh nodes with little control overhead. Simulation results exhibit autonomous load balancing and failure-tolerant performance in wireless mesh networking.     

Diverse Path Routing with Interference and Reusability Consideration in Wireless Mesh Networks

Multipath routing has been extensively employed in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for providing network reliability and survivability, therefore, improves energy consumptions. To provide network survivability, each user should be protected against failures, either node or link failures. For each request, a primary path is set up for normal transmission, and an alternate path (protection path) should also be provided to protect the request in case of network failure. In this paper, we study how to provide survivability using multi-path scheme for dynamic network traffic, where users’ requests have random arrival times. Compared with previous work, our scheme considers interference and reusability factors when providing multiple paths for each request. By applying our scheme, the numerical results show that we can accommodate about 17% more requests than previous schemes. Meanwhile, the results show that our scheme not only accommodates more requests, but also takes less running time to find a solution for each request.     

EPTR: expected path throughput based routing protocol for wireless mesh network

For effective routing in wireless mesh networks, we proposed a routing metric, expected path throughput (EPT), and a routing protocol, expected path throughput routing protocol (EPTR), to maximize the network throughput. The routing metric EPT is based on the estimated available bandwidth of the routing path, considering the link quality, the inter- and intra-flow interference and the path length. To calculate the EPT of a routing path, we first calculate the expected bandwidth of the link and the clique, and then consider the decay caused by the path length. Based on EPT, a distributed routing protocol EPTR is proposed, aiming to balance the network load and maximize the network throughput. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. The results show that the proposed EPTR can effectively balance the network load, achieve high network throughput, and out-perform the existing routing protocols with the routing metrics previously proposed for wireless mesh networks.     

Proportional bandwidth allocation with consideration of delay constraint over IEEE 802.11e-based wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) extend the limited transmission coverage of wireless LANs by enabling users to connect to the Internet via a multi-hop relay service provided by wireless mesh routers. In such networks the quality of experience (QoE) depends on both the user location relative to the Internet gateway and the traffic load. Various channel access or queue management schemes have been proposed for achieving throughput fairness among WMN users. However, delay and bandwidth utilization efficiency of such schemes may be unacceptable for real-time applications. Accordingly, the present study proposes a proportional bandwidth allocation scheme with a delay constraint consideration for enhancing the QoE of users of WMNs based on the IEEE 802.11e standard. An analytical model of the proposed scheme is provided. Moreover, the performance of the proposed scheme is systematically compared with that of existing bandwidth allocation methods. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms previously proposed schemes in terms of both an improved throughput fairness among the WMN users and a smaller end-to-end transmission delay.     

VoIP traffic in wireless mesh networks: a MOS‐based routing scheme

Support of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services in wireless mesh networks requires implementation of efficient policies to support low‐delay data delivery. Multipath routing is typically supported in wireless mesh networks at the network level to provide high fault tolerance and load balancing because links in the proximity of the wireless mesh gateways can be very stressed and overloaded, thus causing scarce performance. As a consequence of using multipath solutions, lower delay and higher throughput can be supported also when a given path is broken because of mobility or bad channel conditions, and alternative routes are available. This can be a relevant improvement especially when assuming that real‐time traffic, such as VoIP, travels into the network. In this paper, we address the problem of Quality of Service (QoS) support in wireless mesh networks and propose a multipath routing strategy that exploits the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) metric to select the most suitable paths for supporting VoIP applications and performing adaptive load balancing among the available paths to equalize network traffic. Performance results assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach when compared with other existing methodologies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On a joint temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme in resource-constrained wireless mesh networks

Use of multiple orthogonal channels can significantly improve network throughput of multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In these WMNs where multiple channels are available, channel assignment is done either in a centralized manner, which unfortunately shows a poor scalability with respect to the increase of network size, or in a distributed manner, where at least one channel has to be dedicated for exchanging necessary control messages or time synchronization has to be utilized for managing the duration of data packet transmission, causing excessive system overhead and waste of bandwidth resource. In this paper, we first formulate multi-channel assignment as a NP-hard optimization problem. Then a distributed, heuristic temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme is proposed, assuming every wireless node in the network is equipped with a single-radio interface. Here the gateway node is set to use all the channels sequentially in a round-robin fashion. This temporal scheme ensures all the nodes that need to directly communicate with the gateway node shall have a fair access to it. For those non-gateway nodes, a spatial scheme where channels are assigned based on their neighbors’ channel usage is adopted to exploit parallel communications and avoid channel interference among nodes. Furthermore, since the routing factors, including channel usage of neighbor nodes, node hop count, node memory size, and node communication history, are all considered along with the channel assignment, network performance, measured by packet delivery latency, channel usage ratio, and memory usage ratio, tends to be considerably enhanced. The simulation results have confirmed that, compared with a couple of well-known multi-channel assignment schemes, such as LCM [21] and ROMA [15], the proposed scheme shows substantial improvement in network throughput with a very modest collision level. In addition, the proposed scheme is highly scalable as the algorithm complexity is only linearly dependent on the total number of channels that are available in the network and the number of neighbors that a network node directly connects to.