Network Adaptive Interference Aware Routing Metric for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks provide a reliable, robust and resilient platform for broadband access. Main benefits of using Wireless Mesh Networks are their low cost, robustness, self healing, and self configuring properties. In Wireless Mesh Networks, routing metric determines the path from source to destination. Wireless link conditions can be affected by a number of factors including interference, congestion, mobility, and network topology. Routing metric needs to consider all these factors while making routing decisions. In addition, wireless link conditions do not remain static with time requiring the routing metric to be adaptive. Interference in Wireless Mesh Networks are of two types: inter-channel and intra-channel interference. Existing routing metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks either consider only one of the two interference types or do not capture changing network conditions. In this paper, we propose a new routing metric for Wireless Mesh Networks which takes into account both inter and intra-channel interference and is adaptive to changing network conditions. Our proposed metric is compared with the state of the art and shows throughput improvement of up to 20 percent and latency reduction of 25 percent.