Multipath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks are envisioned to support the wired backbone with a wireless backbone for providing Internet connectivity to residential areas and offices. Routing protocols designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) primarily concentrate on finding a single best possible route to any destination out of the various paths available. However in wireless mesh networks, traffic is primarily routed either towards the Internet gateways (IGWs) or from the IGWs to the access points (APs). Thus, if multiple APs choose the best throughput path towards a gateway, the traffic loads on certain paths and mesh routers increases tremendously thereby deteriorating the overall performance of the network. To this end, we propose a novel multi-path hybrid routing protocol, multipath mesh (MMESH), that effectively discovers multiple paths. We also propose elegant traffic splitting algorithms for balancing traffic over these multiple paths to synergistically improve the overall performance. Through extensive simulations, we observe that our protocol works very well to cope with the variations in the network. Our protocol also improves the performance of flows traversing multiple hops