Mobility-Aware Hybrid Routing Approach for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are attractive as a new communication paradigm. Ad hoc routing protocols for WMNs are classified into: (a) proactive, (b) reactive, and (c) hybrid approaches. In general, proactive routing is more suitable for a stationary network, while reactive routing is better for a mobile network with a high mobility. In many applications, a node in WMN is mobile but it can fluctuate between being mobile and being stationary. Therefore, a hybrid routing approach with the ability to adapt to node mobility could improve the performance of WMNs. In this paper, we propose a Mobility-aware Hybrid Routing (MHR) approach for WMNs, which varies its routing between reactive and proactive to adapt to node mobility. The MHR basically uses a reactive approach for route discovery, and as a proactive approach it maintains the route entry in the routing table unless the route fails due to node movement, even if the route is not used. In this paper, the MHR approach was applied to AODV, and herein called AODV-MHR. Its performance was compared with that of AODV and OLSR by simulation. The simulation results showed that AODVMHR could achieve the advantages of both reactive and proactive routing approaches in performance.