An Efficient Traffic-Load and Link-Interference Aware Routing Metric for Multi Radio Multi Channel Wireless Mesh Networks Based on Link's Effective Capacity Estimation

Routing metrics proposed for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has various concerns like hop count, packet transmission delay, power consumption, congestion control, load balance and message collision. The routing metric of expected effective capacity (EEC) proposed in this paper guarantees to a select a path providing maximum throughput and minimum delay. A forwarding link constituting routing path is characterized by its quality, capacity, traffic demand and the degree of intervention experienced due to inter-flow and intra-flow interference. Thus the bandwidth actually attainable on a link for a flow is affected by those link properties. Our proposed metric computes the attainable bandwidth for a flow over a path which actually reflects congestion, node delay and traffic pressure on the desired path. Experiments conducted on ns-2 simulations demonstrate that our proposed routing metric can achieve significant improvements in overall network throughput, minimize end-to-end delay and able to distribute network load.