Reliability enhanced routing protocol for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) has become a popular technology to provide broadband Internet access mainly due to its low up-front cost and less administration overhead. A variety of routing protocols are proposed for WMN focussing on higher throughput and performance. On the other hand, determining reliability of an established route is a critical issue because of varying channel conditions, interference and byzantine node-behavior, which has not been considered in most of the existing routing protocols. This leads to degradation in performance. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to enhance the reliability of a routing protocol in WMN evaluating the quality of links. The proposed mechanism is simulated over HWMP (the default path-selection protocol for WMN) and its performance is evaluated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.