Relative Link Quality Assessment and Hybrid Routing Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

We present a link capacity estimation model and a hybrid routing scheme for wireless mesh networks which aims at improving throughput. The multi-source interference between links and frame capture behaviors of nodes are analyzed. Our model provides estimated values which can indicate the relative quality of wireless links. And we present a routing metric which combines multiple factors based on the estimated values. The proposed routing scheme which is independent of special routing protocols adopts different strategies for the traffic of accessing the Internet and the end-to-end traffic. Besides, we introduce a new gateway-assisted routing technique to further improve the performance. Simulation results show that the estimation model provides accurate estimated values enough for route selection, and the routing scheme improves end-to-end throughput by 185% compared with legacy AODV[14] protocol.