Active Path Updation for Layered Routing (APULAR) in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

One of the major research issues in the Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is routing. The routing protocols of ad-hoc networks can be applied for WMN, but have limited success because, ad-hoc networks are mainly structure less networks with highly dynamic topology and harmonized nodes, where WMN are relatively static network with two types of nodes, one fixed mesh routers and mobile clients. In layered routing protocol, source node initiates a path establishing process whenever path breaks. It will cause huge control packets and increase packet loss. This is not an ideal method in WMN where every nodes rather than source and destination in the path are motionless. One way of overcoming this is by initiating the local route repair by destination node.. In this paper, we propose an active path updating procedure (APULAR) for quickly updating the broken path to recover from packet loss. Moreover, to improve throughput and to reduce the co-channel interference, we use multiple interface with multi channels. We are considering 4-hop as an interference range and will use fixed channel assignment within the mesh routers to reduce the inter flow interference. Our procedure is simulated in NS2 and compared with AODV and Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Routing Architecture (IWMRA). Simulation results show that our protocol performs better than IWMRA and AODV in key performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, control overhead, average throughput and end-to-end delay.

Keywords: Active path repair, channel assignment, multi channel routing, and wireless mesh network routing.