Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Overview

Routing is a fundamental characteristic of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The routing protocol's strengths and weaknesses are reflected directly in the WMN's characteristics. Several advantages of WMNs over competing technologies are directly enabled by the routing protocol:

• Reliability: The routing protocol should be able to reroute fast around failed nodes, broken links, and upon the failure of a gateway it should be able to redistribute the orphaned clients among neighboring gateways. For this property, fast reconfiguration and support of multiple gateways is essential.
• Mobile user connectivity: To ensure seamless mobile user connectivity, the routing protocol should enable fast hand-offs.
• Scalability/Efficiency: If the routing protocol has a high overhead, it will be impossible to scale the WMN to a large number of nodes.
• QoS: In addition to support from the medium access control (MAC) layer and the forwarding engine, selecting the best routes for different traffic classes is an essential ingredient for QoS support.

Accomplishments

In this project we introduce a new routing protocol [1] specifically designed for wireless mesh networks. The design of the proposed routing protocol takes advantage of the particularities of the WMNs, only maintaining trees to and from the gateways. Extensive simulation results show that for WMNs, the proposed protocol outperforms existing Internet and MANET routing protocols.

Related Publications

[1] Jangeun Jun and Mihail L. Sichitiu, "MRP: Wireless Mesh Networks Routing Protocol" Center for Advanced Computing and Communications (CACC), Raleigh, NC, Tech. Rep. TR-06/02, September 2006.

MRP was designed using QualNet Network Simulator.