A Cross-Layer Framework for Joint Routing and Resource Management in Multi-radio Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a cross-layer framework for joint routing and resource management for multi-radio infrastructure wireless mesh networks (WMNs). WMNs are emerging as promising wireless backhaul technology to connect various types of networks to the Internet. Multi-Channel Multiple-Radio capabilities of mesh routers in WMNs achieve high performance but introduce interference and can degrade QoS. Thus, the design of cross-layer routing metrics to improve the QoS has become an important research issue. The routing metrics proposed in the literature do not estimate the delay and interference collectively and accurately and lack the analytical model in their design. Thus, we design new routing metric called interference and delay-aware (IDA) metric based on analytical model. IDA estimates the delay using contention as well as transmission delay and inter-flow interference using the combination of logical and physical model. Furthermore, routing protocols use the per-flow-based scheduling mechanism for interface scheduling which incur a delay for multimedia traffic. Toward this, we propose a cross-layer framework by performing per-packet-based scheduling of multiple interfaces using the statistics collected by IDA metric. We implement cross-layer framework in Optimized Link State Routing Protocol using NS2. The results reveal that IDA routing metric performs better in terms of throughput and delay compared to interference-aware routing (iAWARE), contention-aware transmission time (CATT) and metric for interference and channel diversity (MIND). In addition, IDA-based framework for joint routing and interface scheduling provides delay guarantees compared to CATT-based framework reported in the literature.