A new interference-aware routing metric for wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes an interference-aware routing metric function in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in order to select a better path to route the packets. Different from the existing metrics, the new metric function has two advantages. Firstly, it applies cross-layer design to take inter-flow interference, intra-flow interference and load balancing into consideration to capture the characteristics of wireless networks. Secondly, it is proved isotonic by using virtual network decomposition, so that the optimal loop-free path can be found by efficient algorithms with polynomial complexity. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed metric performs significantly better than the existing routing metrics.