Novel link availability aware metrics for routing in wireless mesh networks

This paper presents two novel metrics, Link Occupancy aware routing Metric (LOM) and Residual Link Capacity based routing metric with Interference Consideration (RLCIC), for accurately finding high-throughput paths in multihop wireless mesh networks. The first metric is load-sensitive and aims to balance the traffic load according to the availability of a link to support additional flows. The second metric reproduces better the capacity of a link since it is based on its residual bandwidth. It captures accurately the available path bandwidth information when considering both the intra-flow and the interflow interferences. Using several real experiments carried out into an heterogeneous IEEE 802.11n based network running with OLSR routing protocol, we have shown that our first proposal can accurately determine better paths in terms of throughput and delay, thereby significantly outperforming the other existing metrics. The consistency of the second metric RLCIC is proved formally based on notions of graph theory.