A novel ant colony based cross-layer QoS routing algorithm for wireless mesh networks

According to the heterogeneous characteristics of wireless mesh networks and the QoS requirements of multimedia applications, we design a novel QoS adaptive architecture for WMNs that is cross-domain, cross-layer and cross-node. Furthermore, this architecture is mathematically described by using a bi-level programming model. This model uses the optimization results of subnets as the optimization parameters or optimization constraints of backbone networks, and combines the features of different network domains. Based on this bi-level programming model, we propose an ant colony optimization based routing algorithm. Simulation results show that the bi-level programming model, which fully optimizes various QoS parameters of paths, can effectively adapt to the heterogeneous characteristics of WMNs so as to obtain the optimal path; the proposed routing algorithm, which has both advantages of low complexity and fast convergence speed, can converge to the theoretical optimal solution of bi-level programming model.