End-to-end throughput improvement for single radio multi-channel multi-path wireless mesh networks: a cross layer design

Abstract

The distinguished feature of fixed backbone nodes in the wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be utilized to design an efficient cross layer which cooperates routing and scheduling schemes for increasing end-to-end throughput. With only single radio nodes, by well designing the scheduling and routing schemes for multiple paths, we show that WMN can gain more throughput and reduce communication interference. Much of recent work has focused on those issues applied for “multi-channel, multi-path” environment using multi-radios that is costly and much more complex for implementation. Also, almost all of the proposals work on layer 2 or layer 3 separately that cannot support each other in performing efficiently. Instead, our paper introduces a cross-layer design with new routing algorithm that can balance the numbers of multi-paths and the needed transmission data in each communication session. We also propose a new channel scheduling and queuing models in MAC layer compatible with routing scheme and define a threshold with an effective algorithm to choose the optimal number of disjoint paths for routing scheme. The simulation results show that our multi-path routing scheme performs better than previous proposals in term of throughput improvement which can directly reduce the time of each communication session, especially in case of big size data transmission.