Weighted Integrated Metrics (WIM): A Generic Algorithm for Reliable Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Reliable routing in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is an important need considering a wide deployment of WMNs. Though there are many routing metrics that could choose the best route assessing the hop count, link quality, congestion, queuing delay, interference and many other perturbations in wireless medium, there is no single routing metric that could assess all the perturbations simultaneously and find the best route. Integrating multiple metrics and finding a best route using a consolidated value calculated from those multiple metrics will be a better solution for it. We propose a dynamic and generic algorithm called Weighted Integrated Metrics (WIM), which can be used widely with any routing protocol for reliable routing with consistent throughput. The proposed algorithm performs well especially in highly unstable wireless medium with fast link quality variations and produces consistent higher throughput than existing schemes for integrating metrics. The simulation results using GloMoSim with our real radio API shows that WIM can perform better than the existing routing metrics and integrated metric schemes in highly unstable wireless medium.