Cross-layer Routing Protocol Design For Wireless Mesh Networks

Due to the continuous development of science and technology society, people’srequirement of wireless communication quality enhances unceasingly. With thedevelopment of3G/4G process and MIMO technology, the wireless mesh networkbecomes a very potential wireless technology due to the characteristics of its low cost,high coverage rate, reliability and self-organization, self-configuration. The wirelessmesh network provides a wide range of applications; we can find wireless meshnetworks in LAN and MAN etc. However, due to the mobility of the terminal nodeand the non-stationary of channel quality, the network architecture andcommunication protocol design faces great challenges, especially in routing protocols.To take advantages of multi-channel and multi-radio technology, the link qualityaware routing protocols need to be developed; also the protocols should take loadbalancing in to consideration. So we need to combined routing protocol, media accesscontrol and channel assignment agreement together to take overall design.The main research point in this paper is routing metric for wireless Meshnetworks. After the analysis of how the parameters in MAC layer influence linkquality in wireless Mesh networks, we pick up partial information in MAC layer andnode to calculate a new metric for the network layer which provides a measure for therouting protocol to choose a good path by cross-layer design.First we take a comprehensive introduction of wireless Mesh networks and showthe necessity of cross-layer design in wireless mesh networks. Also, we describe thepresent situation of cross-layer design research.Then, the main factors which affect the link quality in wireless mesh networks areproposed. We recommend a cross-layer routing metric design method for wirelessMesh networks in detail, and make a deep research and analysis in the typicalcross-layer routing metric, point out the advantages and disadvantages of each routingmetric.At last, we propose a new routing metric for wireless Mesh networks. UsingCongestion Avoidance Expected Transmission Time as a routing metric to reflectpath weight, According to the transmit situation of control frames in802.11and the node queue utilization rate, a reasonable path is chosen in terms of the channelcompetition status, link data frame delivery rate and the node queue utilization rate.And we provide the link quality aware routing adaptive mechanisms and routingstability mechanism. We analyze the advantages of this routing metric, and takesimulation experiments in glomosim to show the performance of the network.