A load-aware routing metric for wireless mesh networks

Routing metrics play a critical role in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Several metrics have already been proposed but none of them can effectively capture both local traffic load and hidden node issues. This paper proposes a load and interference-aware routing metric for wireless mesh networks, named contention window based (CWB) metric. Our metric assigns weights to individual links based on both channel utilization and the average contention window used on these links. The individual link weights are combined into path metric that accounts for load balancing and interference between links that use the same channel. Thus the CWB metric helps the routing protocol to balance traffic and improve network capacity by avoiding routing traffic through congested areas. The preliminary quantitative experiments show significant improvement over hop-count based method when using the proposed metric.