Design and implementation of a WLAN mesh router based on multipath routing

This paper focuses on the development of an IEEE 802.11s-based WLAN mesh router, which supports a multichannel with multi-interface. In this work, we implemented not only the single path routing based AODV defined in IEEE 802.11s HWMP, but also a multipath routing which extended the standard. The multipath routing was intended to reduce the recovery time and the control message overhead when the routing path was recovered from node or link failure. We also developed an outdoor test bed with 12 WLAN mesh routers. The bandwidth of the mesh router and a real-time video streaming service were verified using the test bed. The single path and multipath routing algorithms are also compared. The average TCP bandwidth was 23.77 Mbps and the latency was 2.4 ms in five hops. The test bed could service real-time streaming of MPEG4 VGA video with an average jitter of 0.547 ms in five hops. The mesh router that used the multipath routing path reduced the path recovery time by 12.73% on average.