NEIGHBOURHOOD LOAD ROUTING AND MULTI-CHANNELS IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

Abstract

As an emerging technology, wireless mesh networks are making significant progress in the area of wireless networks in recent years. Routing in Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is challenging because of the unpredictable variations of the wireless environment. Traditional mechanisms have been proved that the routing performance would get deteriorated and ideal metrics must be explored. Most wireless routing protocols that are currently available are designed to use a single channel. The available network capacity can be increased by using multiple channels, but this requires the development of new protocols specifically designed for multi-channel operation. In this paper, we propose Neighbourhood load routing metric in single channel mesh networks and also present the technique to utilize multiple channels and multiple interfaces between routers for communication. The traditional routing metrics Hop Count and Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time (WCETT) are used in routing. We compare performance of AODV-HOP, WCETT and NLR routing metrics in singlechannel and multichannel environment by considering throughput and end to end delay performance metrics. Our results show that NLR performs better in singlechannel environment