A Cross Layer Routing Metric to Recognize Traffic Interference in Wireless Mesh Networks

As an emerging technology, wireless mesh networks are making significant progress in the area of wireless networks in recent years. However, the nature of sharing transmission medium makes it challenging to fully exploit these networks. In an attempt to improve the radio resource utilization, several routing metrics have been specifically designed for wireless mesh networks. However none of these routing metrics efficiently tackles interference issues. In this paper, we propose a routing metric for wireless mesh networks, which takes account of the amount of interference by considering the traffic situation of adjacent nodes and selects less interfered path for transmission. The aim of this metric is to route the traffic through interference areas and balance the load amongst the network nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed routing metric reduces the end-to-end delay when compared to the MIC, ETT and hop-count routing metrics.