MDSDV: a modified DSDV routing mechanism for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which are consisted of mesh routers and mesh clients, have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. WMNs integrate the advantages of wireless local area networks (WLAN) and ad hoc networks and more and more researches have focused on it. In WMNs' routing mechanisms can significantly affect WMNs' performance and optimal routing mechanisms are imperative to gain the potential advantages of WMNs. In research of WMNs' routing mechanisms, previous work mostly focuses on modifying the existing ad hoc routing mechanisms while this paper focuses on modifying destination-sequenced distance-vector routing mechanism (DSDV) with cross-layer design method and proposes the modified destination-sequenced distance-vector routing mechanism (MDSDV) for WMNs. Different from DSDV, the proposed MDSDV uses the integrated effects of bandwidth and hop count as the routing metric for selecting appropriate routes. Moreover, this paper simulates the proposed MDSDV in the network simulator-2 (NS2) comparing with previous DSDV and the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing. The simulation results show that the proposed MDSDV can preferably fit the specific characteristics of WMNs and it is the relative best choice for WMNs which consist of a large number of nodes and need high packet delivery rate, low end-to-end delay and insensitive routing overhead.