Capacity-Aware Routing in Multi-Channel Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks

Employing multiple channels in wireless multi-hop networks is regarded as an effective approach to increasing network capacity. However, existing routing protocols may not be able to properly utilize the advantages of multiple channels in such networks. In this paper, we focus on IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks with stationary nodes, such as wireless backhaul networks and community wireless networks. We propose a new path metric called Bottleneck Link Capacity (BLC) which accounts for the link quality, the interference among links, and the traffic load on the links. Then, we develop a routing protocol called Capacity-Aware Routing (CAR) which makes use of BLC as the routing metric. Finally, we evaluate the performance of BLC via simulations. The results show that our path metric outperforms others in terms of system throughput and end-to-end delay.