iBATD: A New Routing Metric for Multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

An easy and low-cost approach to address the limit capacity problem in wireless mesh networks that has recently been proposed is to install multiple wireless radios for a single wireless node. Operating the radios within each node on non-overlapping channels can utilize the radio spectrum more greedily and thereby reduces interference and contention. In such multi-radio wireless mesh networks, an effective routing metric should deal with channel diversity in order to make a wise routing path selection. In this paper, we propose a novel routing metric called iBATD (improved Bottleneck Aware Transmission Delay metric)for multi-radio wireless mesh networks. The fundamental idea relies on the observation that the channel with the maximum transmission delay(bottleneck) along one path has the most negative impact on the entire path performance. To accurately measure transmission delay for the bottleneck channel, the iBATD metric improves the BATD routing metric by considering the MAC overhead as well as the link loss rate discrepancy within one path. Our experimental results show that the new iBATD metric outperforms BATD in case of throughput and average latency.