Channel Aware Routing Metric for IEEE 802.11 multi-channel Mesh Networks

Implementing multiple channels among the multi-radio nodes of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) improve the capacity of the network. In this paper, we propose channel aware routing metric (CARM) as a new routing metric that facilitates the use of available channels in 802.11 WMNs. It chooses a route that has better link quality, reduced switching delay and better channel diversity. Unlike all the other metrics, CARM makes a combination between the number of interfaces and the number of channels available to improve the performance of the network. Simulation results show that by utilizing all the channels in the frequency spectrum, CARM performs better than other standard metrics.