Performance analysis of single and multipath routings in wireless mesh networks

Designing efficient routing procedure with a decision whether to choose single path or multiple paths is always considered as a key challenge in wireless multihop networks. The inherent multi-access and broadcast nature of wireless medium coupled with traffic variations and resource contention poses further challenges on selecting efficient routing patterns. The objective of this paper is the analyses and evaluation of single path and multipath routing models in the context of changing network conditions to observe which type of routing pattern is optimal for a given network scenario. The throughput maximization routing algorithms has been formulated for both types of routing strategies. The algorithms have been evaluated using realistic network scenarios by generating random topologies having uncertain traffic demand. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithms. In addition, these results identify a number of performance metrics which can be used to design efficient routing schemes.