Optimizing Routing Metrics for Large-Scale Multi-Radio Mesh Networks

Routing metrics play a critical role in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Several metrics have already been proposed but none of them can well meet the specific requirement brought by large-scale multi-radio mesh networks (LSMRMNs). In LSMRMNs, most of traffic has much longer paths than in small scale WMNs. The channel distribution on a long path thus has a significant impact on the route performance. In this paper, we identify such a challenge and study five existing routing metrics. Then we describe a novel interference-aware routing metric, named exclusive expected transmission time (EETT), proposed to select multi-channel routes with the least interference to maximize the end-to-end throughput. Both the theoretic analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the vantages of EETT.