Routing in 802.11-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

IEEE 802.11 has become the standard for home and enterprise deployment of wireless local area networks (LANs). Routing governs the flow of packets through the WMN. While shortest path routing minimizes the amount of network bandwidth used to transfer packets, it does not consider important factors such as link errors, link criticality, or channel diversity during path selection. Intelligent selection of paths based on these factors can not only improve the quality of path chosen for current stream of packets, but also potentially enable network to admit more packet load in future. In this paper, we discuss several representative routing techniques proposed in the literature. We do not discuss the various options for routing protocols themselves; usually one of the well-known routing protocols developed for ad hoc networks will suffice. Instead, we focus on the various techniques developed to discover and utilize high-quality routes.