High-Throughput Path Selection Scheme for Multimedia Application in Wireless Networks

To discovery a high-throughput path for multimedia application, such as 3D stereoscopic application, in wireless mesh networks, existing route selection schemes only use a link quality metric based on the expected amount of medium time it takes to successfully transmit a packet. Thus, these schemes may easily result in network congestion. This is because the current status of traffic load is not considered in routing metrics. In this paper, we describe the performance of existing routing metrics based on link quality and propose a new routing metric, called NLCRM (Network Load-aware and Contention-aware Routing Metric) that consider per-hop queuing delay, contention delay and link transmission time based on link quality for the current service level of network. In addition, NLCRM includes additional transmission delay at bottleneck link due to intra-flow interference in terms of the maximum throughput of intra-flow. Extensive simulations are carried out via the OPNET simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that NLCRM selects more accurate high-throughput routes, compared with existing routing metrics..