Load and Interference Aware Routing Metric for WLAN Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks recently attract significant interests due to the minimal infrastructure demands and their potential for supporting mobile and pervasive computing. This work introduces a routing scheme to find best performance routes in WLAN mesh networks. A cross-layer approach is used to overcome self-interference issue of existing load-aware routing metrics. The proposed routing metric was evaluated on a multi-hop wireless emulator which allows us to emulate wireless networks on a wired testbed. Design and implementation of AEROMAN (Architecture to Evaluate Routing Protocols for Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks) used in the emulator are presented. AEROMAN is the first, to the best of our knowledge, fully distributed approach taking into account properties of contention-based media access for wireless channel, and does not require any special hardware to emulate wireless channel.