ABSTRACT

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of mesh routers and mesh clients, where mesh routers have minimal mobility and form the backbone of WMNs. They provide network access for both mesh and conventional clients. In a WMN, it is possible to reach an IGW or any mesh router (MR) through multiple paths. However this may lead to an undesirable situation in which the best paths may degrade due to the load, consequently resulting in suboptimal performance. To this end, we propose a reactive Hop-Count based multi-path routing protocol which is aware of congestion and location of its immediate neighbors for an Infrastructural Wireless Mesh Network. With support of congestion-aware mechanism, nodes can choose links which have enough available bandwidth for incoming flow’s requirement. The main consideration is on the study of routing metric with fast route discovery, minimum hops, minimum delays, maximum data rates and minimum error rates. Simulation results, show that our proposed routing metric is better than existing ETX and ETT metric used in routing.