Streamlined Re-routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

The frequent failures in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) cause severe performance degradations during their lifetime. This increases the need of re-routing of links in WMNs. Expensive manual network management is required for their real-time recovery. This paper presents a Streamlined Re-routing Algorithm (SRA) that enables a multi-radio WMN to autonomously recover from local link failures to preserve network performance. SRA makes necessary changes in local radio and channel assignments in order to recover from failures, by using channel and radio diversities in WMNs. A default channel is used for transmission till the reconfiguration is done. Based on current channel and radio associations, feasible local configuration changes available around a faulty area are identified. SRA identifies reconfiguration plans that require the minimum number of changes for the network settings. Based on the generated configuration changes and interference aware channel assignment, the system cooperatively reconfigures network settings among local mesh routers. The results show that the proposed algorithm improves the throughput and decreases the packet drops.