A New Interference Aware Routing Metric for Efficient Load Balancing In 802.11s Networks

A new kind of wireless multi-hop network architecture called Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has recently attracted much attention. WMNs have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid deployment, instant communication capabilities and support for many types of application. For these applications, network congestion and interference is the main reasons for lower throughput and longer delay. Most of the present routing protocols for WMN’s are not designed to adapt congestion, interference and optimal link quality. In this paper, we propose congestion and interference aware multipath routing protocol called EAOMDV-iLB for multiradio multiple interface wireless mesh networks (WMN). The protocol calculates multiple paths using proposed airtime congestion and interference aware (ACIA) metric and performs load balancing by computing queue utilization of multiple interfaces of a node in terms of reduced interflow and intraflow interference. Moreover, the effective load balancing technique maintains data transmission on optimal path by diverting traffic all the way through congested area. The simulation results using ns2 reveal that our proposed load balancing scheme performs better than AOMDV in terms of throughput, end-to end delay with high traffic density. Keywords—Wireless Mesh Network; multiple interfaces and multiple channels; airtime link cost metric; round trip time; congestion; load balancing; Received signal strength indicator.