A Link Type Aware Routing Metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) aim to solve the limitations and consequently to improve the performance of ad hoc networks, wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs). In this paper we introduce a new routing metric for WMNs, which is called LTA (link type aware) metric. Unlike former metrics, LTA considers the special structure of WMNs and uses different link type among nodes to represent link quality. Without additional costs, LTA can be applied to most existing routing protocols. We imply LTA on AODV and compare the performance with mini-hop metric by simulation. Simulation results show that LTA metric can find reliable routes and reduce link-broken times in typical WMNs scenarios