Link-state routing without broadcast storming for multichannel mesh networks

A link-state routing protocol tailored for multichannel mesh networks is proposed. One drawback of using multichannel communications is the high overhead involved in broadcast operations: a transmitter should transmit a broadcast packet to all channels that may be occupied by receivers. This makes certain broadcast-intensive mechanisms, such as link-state routing, difficult to implement. The link-state routing protocol proposed in this paper is tailored for multichannel mesh networks by minimizing the broadcast overheads. This is achieved by a special set of nodes, called cluster-heads. We have implemented our protocol on a multichannel mesh network test bed and compared its performance with an AODV-like reactive routing protocol, also tailored for multichannel mesh networks. The measurements show that the proposed link-state routing protocol provides transient communications with comparable or better performance. Ways to improve the performance of the proposed routing with infrastructure access is also discussed.