A novel routing metric for mesh networks

In this paper, we propose a novel routing metric for efficient routing in 802.11 wireless mesh network. Recently a number of routing metrics have been proposed for mesh networks which aim at selecting the "best" route between a pair of mesh routers. In particular, the ETX metric stands out as the basis of all contemporary routing metrics.In this paper, we address certain deficiencies of the ETX and other contemporary metrics and propose a novel routing metric ERS (Efficient Route Selection) which takes a number of factors into consideration including the intra-flow interference generated between successive hops of a flow and existing traffic load on a route to select the "best" available route between mesh routers. Simulation based comparison of ERS with Hop Count, ETX and ETT shows performance improvement in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay.