Multi-gateway multi-path routing protocol for 802.11s WMN

Wireless mesh networks usually deploy multiple gateways to enhance the capacity. This paper studies how to maintain forwarding paths in 802.11s wireless mesh network. A Multi-Gateway Multipath routing protocol (MGMP) is proposed to explore path diversity. MGMP constructs multiple paths between source and destination using a proactive tree architecture as HWMP. In order to make MGMP more efficient, three optimized heuristics are discussed by simulation. Our ns-2 experiment results show that MGMP consistently outperforms three representative routing protocols, HWMP, AODV and OLSR. Especially MGMP gives 12.8% throughput gain and reduces routing overhead to 20% compared with HWMP.