Design, implementation and simulation of wireless mesh networks routing protocols with link quality and interference awareness

Abstract

Routing metrics are vital when determining the performance of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). During the implementation of routing protocols, routing metrics are assigned to different paths and the calculation of the best paths is a function for predicting the best routing path. This study proposes enhancements to the Multi-Hop Effective Bandwidth (MHEB) routing metric commonly used in WMNs. The proposed routing metrics are called improved Multi-Hop Effective Bandwidth (iMHEB) and extended improved Multi-Hop Effective Bandwidth (XiMHEB). The iMHEB routing takes into consideration the wireless link asymmetry to improve the MHEB routing metric. The XiMHEB, routing metric takes into account the average time spent for single data transmission to enhance the iMHEB routing metric. Our proposed metrics, iMHEB and XiMHEB are respectively implemented into Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) routing protocols resulting into novel routing protocols. The simulation results based on OPNET modeler 14 show that the novel routing protocols perform better than traditional routing protocols in terms of throughput and delay. The novel routing protocols simultaneously achieve link quality and interference awareness.