Adaptive path selection for high throughput Heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

Heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks (HetMesh) is a promising high throughput technology for multi-hop data forwarding by mobile clients and backbone routers in a dynamic environment. HetMesh supports Wifi-Direct facility and other separate access technologies in its mobile clients, which makes the selection of a suitable next hop forwarder for data transmission challenging. This paper proposes a unified path determination scheme for high throughput HetMesh, where a novel resilient path metric is defined by combining multiple path selection criteria to leverage the resource availability of clients for acting as potential forwarders. The proposed scheme can be augmented with any existing hybrid routing protocol to improve its path selection quality, as well as to make the path selection process adaptive. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through testbed as well as simulation results. The analysis shows that the proposed path selection mechanism shows on average 30% - 50% improvement in average throughput, while also improving other performance metrics.