Designing an Efficient Delay Sensitive Routing Metric for IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

Quality of Service provisioning is one of the major design goals of IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. In order to provide quality delivery of delay sensitive services such as voice, video etc., it is required to route such traffic over a minimum delay path. In this paper we propose a routing metric for delay sensitive services in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. We design a new cross layer routing metric, namely Expected Scheduler Delay (ESD), based on HoldOff exponent and the current load at each node of the network. This proposed metric takes into account the expected theoretical end-to-end delay of routing paths as well as network congestion to find the best suited path. We propose an efficient distributed scheme to calculate ESD and route the packets using source routing mechanism based on ESD. The simulation results demonstrate that our metric achieves reduced delay compared to a standard scheme used in IEEE 802.16 mesh, that takes hop count to find the path.