Monitoring assisted robust routing in wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we present a monitoring assisted routing scheme for wireless mesh networks which exploits the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions at special routers with added monitoring functionalities. These routers listen to the transmissions in neighborhood and compare the routing behavior against the routing state collectively maintained by them. If any inconsistency is found, as a result of software/hardware malfunction, these routers try to determine the node causing it and recover from it in a timely fashion. The scheme is developed for wireless mesh networks where the communication overhead is a critical issue. The performance evaluation of our scheme shows considerable improvement in reliability (i.e., delivery ratio) with minimal overhead under situations of malfunctions.