Research On Routing Protocols In Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh network is a multi-hop broadband wireless network, which has high speed, easy configuration, low price and stable performance. In addition, heterogeneous wireless networks can be interconnected via mesh network. Routing protocol is one of the key technologies in the wireless mesh network. Since a high-efficiency routing protocol could guarantee better service, design and implementation of suitable routing protocols for wireless mesh network according to its own characteristics has vital theory and practice meaning. This paper is focused on this topic.First of all, this paper concludes the general research routine and procedures in wireless mesh networks and introduces related research methods and results of different procedures: firstly, it makes classification and comparison of the classic routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks; secondly, it introduces several ways in which the classic ad hoc routing protocols can be modified to be used in the wireless mesh networks; thirdly, it makes detailed explanations of some typical routing protocols in each way above.Then this paper makes a deep analysis on the HWMP proposed in 802.11s, points out some defects in root selection and proactive tree generation and makes improvements as follows: it proposes a distributed root selection algorithm to improve the simple direct configuration of root in the draft; it also proposes a ETX-based proactive tree generation algorithm to improve the simple minimal spanning tree based on hop count in the draft.And then this paper proposed a routing protocol based on stability selection, which can be considered as an improvement of AODV. The main idea of stability selection is that it gives priority to the most stable nodes to establish the route path, which can make the routing more stable and robust. Simulation results demonstrate that this routing protocol has better performances than AODV on average packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and average route overhead and so on.Finally, this paper describes a verification method of the proposed stability-selection based routing protocol on our mesh test bed which has been established via Microsoft MCL softwares.