A PHY/MAC-Aware cross-layer routing metric for wireless mesh networks

Due to the characteristics of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in terms of topology, transmission link and traffic, the conventional layered protocol design methods for wired networks can not guarantee the performance for WMNs. To reach a tradeoff between the efficiency of radio resources and QoS requirements such as high throughput and low delay, it is required to explore the new design method for WMNs based on physical layer, MAC layer, routing layer, etc. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer routing metric called enhanced expected transmission delay (EETD).In contrast to previously proposed routing metrics, EETD takes into account of the multi-rate in IEEE 802.11 MAC layer. The implementation of EETD metric in proactive routing protocol such as destination sequenced distance vector (DSDV) is also given. Simulation results show that our proposed cross-layer routing metric achieves better performance in comparison to the traditional minimum hops(MH) metric.