Multipath Routing Design for Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted considerable interest from both academia and industry. WMNs offer attractive advantages such as easy installation, fast deployment, and low operating expense. For this reason, many cities and network operators have built WMNs to provide wireless Internet access in metropolitan areas. Despite their advantages, WMNs face numerous challenges such as limited and fluctuating bandwidth of wireless links, interference among wireless links, and reliability issues due to broken links and faulty nodes caused by external impacts. Multipath routing can address these challenges and provides several benefits such as bandwidth aggregation, load balancing, optimal resource utilization, and high fault-tolerance. This paper presents a multipath routing design for WMNs. We evaluate our multipath routing design using simulations and compare it with the popular routing protocol Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) for WMNs. Our evaluation shows promising results for our multipath routing design.