An Interference Aware Routing Scheme Based on Channel Load for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

This paper focuses on the implementation and the verification of an interference aware routing scheme based on channel-load for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh network. Channel-load which is defined in IEEE 802.11k is channel consumption per time period of radio channel. Channel-load metric is able to recognize interference better than existing metrics in IEEE 802.11 networks. As a result, this routing metric achieves higher performance than other metrics in the environment with interference that has insufficient radio channel resources like wireless mesh network. Also, transmission of additional packets are not required to measure routing metric, and the status of wireless links is reflected accurately by using this metric, because it is calculated from channel busy time and measurement duration of profiling registers in the WALN interface. In this paper, we implemented the channel-load metric on WLAN mesh routers and verified the performance of the WLAN mesh network using this metric. The WLAN mesh network with the proposed routing scheme has improved both the throughput and the probability to select better route by about 30% than other schemes.