Interference-aware multipath routing in wireless mesh network

Abstract

The inherent mesh infrastructure of IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks provides added support to construct multiple robust paths. However, based on geometric locations of wireless nodes, neighborhood interference and channel contention impose challenges on multipath routing schemes. A large body of research has been carried out to maximize aggregate end-to-end throughput using multipath routing; however, interference has not been accurately modeled in majority of the work. Based on the relative location of transmitters and receivers, information asymmetric non-coordinated interference introduces bottleneck links and significantly reduces the aggregate throughput. The impact of this interference is even observed on links several hops away. In this paper, multipath routing is integrated with topology control to manage such multilevel asymmetric interference. An optimization model has been presented with an objective to achieve optimized end-to-end throughput using multiple available paths, considering coordinated and asymmetric non-coordinated interference. The goal of this research is to develop a multipath routing strategy which can achieve better end-to-end throughput by purging badly affected asymmetric non-coordinated interfering links during path construction procedure. The proposed model and routing strategy have been tested through extensive simulations. The results clearly exhibit the efficacy of the proposed approach, which achieves better aggregate end-to-end throughput compared to existing multipath routing schemes.