Implementing channel-load aware routing scheme for IEEE 802.11 mesh networks

Abstract

This paper focuses on the implementation and the verification of channel-load aware routing scheme at the mesh router that was developed in previous research. The proposed routing scheme uses the channel-load metric for establishing the route. We calculate the channel-load metric using a method defined in IEEE 802.11k. As a result, the routing scheme does not need to transmit extra probe packets unlike existing routing metrics. The routing scheme uses the register value in hardware to make the metric and reflects directly the usage of channel. In addition, the routing scheme is able to balance the load in real-time, because it is based on pro-active mode of HWMP. The routing scheme is implemented in the mesh engine of the mesh router. We made actual experiments using the mesh router and verified the performance of the routing scheme. The proposed routing scheme has improved the throughput by about 25% and has latency decrement by about 18% on average than hop-count metric.