RARE - Resource Aware Routing for mEsh

An important element of any routing protocol used for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is the link cost function used to represent the radio link characteristic. The majority of the routing protocols for WMNs attempt to accurately characterise the radio link quality by constructing the link cost function from the measurements obtained using active probing techniques, which introduces overhead. In this paper we propose a new approach called resource aware routing for mesh (RARE) which instead employs passive monitoring to gather radio link information. This results in a smaller overhead than the other methods that require active network probing, and is load independent since it does not require an access to the medium. Moreover, we show that our RARE approach performs well in a real radio environment through a number of experiments performed on a static 17 node WLAN mesh testbed.