Interference-Aware Routing Metric for Improved Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks are an attractive solution for providing last-mile connectivity. However, the shared nature of the transmission medium makes it challenging to fully exploit these networks. Nodes interfere with each other, resulting in packet loss and degraded network performance. In this paper, a routing metric specifically designed for WMNs is proposed. The Interference-Aware Routing metric (IAR) uses MAC-level information to measure the share of the channel that each link is able to utilize effectively. As a result, paths are selected that exhibit the least interference. Simulations show that utilizing this metric provides significant performance improvements in terms of end-to-end delay compared to several existing metrics.