Diversity based review of Multipath Routing Metrics of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are considered as robust architecture to provide reliable connectivity to fixed and mobile users. The redundant infrastructure provided by WMN can be efficiently utilized using multipath routing. However, the performance gain of multipath routing mainly depends on efficient path selection protocols. The omni-directional wireless medium, unstable link quality and mutual path interference are some of those factors which greatly affect the performance of multipath routing protocols. Routing metrics play a pivotal role for the selection of reliable paths. This paper has investigated a variety of existing single and multi-radio routing metrics to analyze their limitations in finding multiple reliable paths around interfering neighborhood. The paper thus proposes a Diversity based Multipath Routing Metric (DMRM) which basis its calculation on diverse wireless network conditions. The routing metric not only captures interfering traffic load on the link but also considers link loss ratio, inter and intra-flow interference, multiple data rates of nodes and channel diversity during multipath selection. DMRM integrates multiple routing conditions to overcome the limitations of existing metrics. The proposed metric is integrated with Diversity-based Multipath Routing Protocol (DMRP). DMRP is designed to select optimal path in terms of packet delivery ratio, lower level of interference, fewer congested links and multipath load balancing to achieve higher throughput and reduced end-to-end packet delay.