MAC-aware Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks - A survey

In the last years Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) became more and more important and due to that the number of clients and the amount of data transferred over those networks grew constantly. The main reason why WMNs earned more attention is because they are an easy and cheap alternative to connect large areas with the internet, that maybe could not be connected with wires before. Conservative routing algorithms, especially those that are used frequently in today’s wired networks are not performing well in a wireless environment. They need to be optimized and configured regarding to the properties of WMN links. Further on, that means to specify routing metrics that are aware of all circumstances that may influence the performance of those networks. I will give an overview of current approaches that are trying to improve the performance of WMN links by using routing algorithms and metrics tailored especially for use within a wireless environment. More precisely, this essay will cover the approaches that try improve the throughput by incorporating the given mechanisms of the 802.11 MAC layer.