Multipath Routing Based on Path Bandwidth in Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Mesh routers in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) utilize multiple radio interfaces in order to improve the performance of wireless network, resulting in transmitting multiple packets simultaneously on different orthogonal channels without interference. For the purpose of achieving the goal, routing protocols should be designed to improve the utilization of the network resources when selecting routes between source and destination nodes. However, single path routing protocols cannot explore the path providing sufficient bandwidth if the source traffic requires more bandwidth than the available bandwidth of the route. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel multipath routing algorithm which can explore multiple paths with sufficient bandwidth and transmit packets along disjointed paths simultaneously. we also introduce the path metrics which can estimate the available bandwidth of the path, considering the interface utilization information of each node, the channel diversity of route, and the intra-flow of the traffic. Using NS-2 simulations, we observe that our proposed multi-path routing protocol contributes to the performance improvements in terms of the end-to-end delay and the throughput in WMNs.