Diss . Eth No . 17737 Interference - Aware Routing in Wireless Multihop Networks

Nowadays, wireless multihop networks, providing mesh connectivity emerge as alternative network infrastructure for numerous applications such as shared broadband Internet access, monitoring for emergency, medical and security reasons, distributed backup and multimedia applications. Since these networks are highly decentralized and self-organized, routing becomes a critical factor for their performance and efficiency. The work in this thesis focuses on interference-aware routing. Interference is an inherent property of wireless networks determining boundaries for spectrum reuse and directly affecting the network capacity as well as protocol performance. Estimating interference in a wireless network and circumventing its effects is not a trivial task. The amount of interference depends on many factors including the radio propagation environment, spatial node distribution, MAC protocol dynamics. Therefore, adding interference-awareness to the routing protocol decisions is challenging. The first contribution of this thesis is a quantitative comparison of multipath routing protocols proposed for wireless multihop networks. Multipath routing represents a promising alternative to single-path routing in that it enables load balancing and resilience to route failures. We show that multipath routing outperforms single-path in networks with high node density and network load and the use of two, maximum three, paths represents the best