Evaluating the Impact of Multiple Paths in a Wireless Mesh Network with Distributed Scheduling Schemes

In this paper, we study the problem of joint routing and link scheduling to support high data rates for broadband wireless multi-hop networks. We first address multi-path routing in a static wireless mesh network. We review the premise that a routing protocol should prefer disjoint path construction and argue that using disjoint path limits route reliability in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) compared to using multiple loop-free paths that need not be disjoint. The new multi-path parallel routing protocol (MPRP) developed runs over a TDMA MAC protocol based on the coordinated distributed scheduling scheme (CDS) of the Std. IEEE 802.16. Moreover, we propose a variant of the coordinated distributed scheduling scheme called distributed scheduling scheme (DSS). Through extensive simulations, we show that multi-path routing protocol outperforms in terms of throughput and average end-to-end delay a well-known routing protocol ad-hoc on demand distance vector routing. Both protocols, MPRP and AODV run over the MAC protocol with the CDS or the DSS schemes. The synergic effect of multiple paths and conflict-free schedules generated at MAC layer alleviate the bottleneck created in a scenario in which only a node, the Internet Gateway, is assumed as destination and the others nodes are either source nodes or relay nodes. Compared to CDS we show that our DSS is more robust in different wireless network topologies.