Load aware traffic engineering for mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop mesh network that consists of mesh routers and mesh clients, where mesh routers are static and form the backbone of the mesh network. The static nature of mesh nodes imposes requirements for designing routing metrics that support high-throughput and low packet delay. This article considers the problem of Interference-Load Aware routing in multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks. We propose a new Interference-Load Aware routing metric, ILA, that finds paths with reduced inter-flow and intra-flow interference. The aim of this metric is to route the traffic through congestion free areas and balance the load amongst the network nodes. We incorporate this new metric in the well known AODV routing protocol and study the performance of ILA through simulations. We show that the proposed metric is able to adapt to changes in interfering traffic better than existing link metrics such as ETT, WCETT and MIC. We also demonstrate that our metric delivers high-throughput in multi-channel networks.