A congestion and interference aware routing metric for Wireless Mesh networks

Wireless Mesh networks will play an important role in the next generation wireless communication systems because it can support broadband services with ubiquitous coverage and low transmission power. Traditional routing protocols send traffic along shortest hop-count path and have been shown unfair and ineffective. This paper proposes an integrated metric considering load balancing and inter-flow interference to enhance the basic trip time metric based on hop-count by incorporating the node congestion-level and path interference-degree. It uses a congestion aware routing and interference avoidance to achieve global load balancing in the network. Simulation results show significant performance improvement of the proposed metric.