A cross layer Interference and delay aware routing metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we propose a new cross layer routing metriccalled MILD (Metric for InterferenceLoad and Delay) for a Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). WMNs have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid deployment and instant communication capabilities. One of the factors that influence the performance of WMNs is the underlying routing algorithm and its routing metric. A number of routing metrics are proposed for WMN. A good routing metric must capture the features link load, delay and interference in a realistic manner without adding much control overhead. Our routing metric assigns weights to individual links using channel utilization, packet loss, available bandwidth and average contention window and finds the optimal path through the least congested paths. We use popular proactive protocol Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) to implement our routing metric. We carried out extensive evaluation of MILD using random topologies for both static and dynamic scenarios using NS2.34. The simulation results reveal that MILD performs better in terms of throughput, average end-to-end delay and packet loss compared to well known routing metrics Expected Transmission Count (ETX) and Channel utilization and Contention Window Based routing metric (C2WB).