Comparative Analysis of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Network Environment

Wireless Mesh Networks is one of the most promising wireless technologies of the future. Its tolerance factor against the network failures, convenience of set-up and manageability are one of its major advantages. Though WMNs are very similar to ad hoc wireless networks, the architecture and protocols designed for ad hoc networks perform very poor when applied in WMNs. The reason of their poor performance is that the ad hoc networks are designed for high mobility while the WMNs are designed for either a static or limited mobility. WMNs are usually rich in resources contrasting ad hoc wireless networks. One of the major issues in WMNs is the resource management that plays an important role in any network’s performance. The research has mainly focused on the evaluation of routing protocols to be used in WMNs. Performance metrics that are used for analysis and study are throughput, delays and network load as these are crucial for providing guaranteed End-to-End Quality of Service (QoS).