Reliable Multi Path Routing for 802.16 Wireless Mesh Networks

The effective technique to avoid congestion and losses in networks is by multipath routing. Multipath routing constructs multiple paths for a source and destination and provides fault-tolerance and reliability. In IEEE 802.16 Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), very little work has been done on multipath routing. Also traditional multipath routing protocols induce the flooding of control messages and congestion in gateways. In this paper, we propose a Reliable multipath routing (RMR) protocol for 802.16 wireless mesh networks. It consists of a combined routing metric which is based on interference and load on the links. Multiple shortest paths are discovered based on the combined routing metric and the source node chooses the path with the minimum weight value as the primary path. The paths with next minimum weight values are selected as backup paths. Initially the data transmission takes place using the primary path and during any fault, it can be switched over the backup paths. By simulation results, we show that the proposed protocol provides better throughput with reduced delay and overhead.