AFC: An Effective Metric for Reliable Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Routing metric plays a vital role in path selection process. A variety of routing metrics have been proposed to enhance the performance of routing protocols. Considering the forwarding behavior of neighbor node in the design of a routing metric would address the most generic packet dropping attacks in wireless mesh network (WMN). The existing routing metrics to address packet dropping attack in WMN only consider selfish mesh routers. On the other hand, to the best of our knowledge no such routing metric has been proposed to address the malicious behavior of mesh routers in a network. In this paper, we propose an airtime link metric AFC (Airtime Forwarding Capability), that considers both selfish and malicious behavior of mesh routers. AFC is computed using local station level measurements and does not require direct cooperation from any neighbor node, thereby avoiding neighbor lying attacks. The analysis of proposed metric shows that it satisfies the required design properties of a routing metric. The experimental results confirm the performance enhancement by accounting for the malicious behavior of mesh routers.