Beyond conventional routing protocols: Opportunistic path selection for IEEE 802.11s mesh networks

IEEE 802.11s provides Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) to find out the forwarding path in a mesh network based on mesh peering and MAC layer scheduling information. However, both proactive and reactive modes of HWMP perform poorly for multi-radio mesh network because of inefficient radio selection, time-varying channel conditions and interference among the radios. This paper proposes an improved opportunistic path selection protocol over HWMP for multi-radio support that goes beyond the traditional routing mechanisms, operates either in proactive, reactive or hybrid mode. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is analyzed using simulation results.