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.