Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks with Bandwidth Guarantees

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has become an im-portant edge network to provide Internet access to remote areas and wireless connections in a metropolitan scale. In this paper, we describe our hop-by-hop bandwidth guar-anteed routing protocol in IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks. Due to interference among links, band-width, a well-known bottleneck metric in wired networks, is neither concave nor additive in wireless networks. To facilitate hop-by-hop routing, we develop a mechanism for computing the available bandwidth of a path in a distributed manner. Unfortunately, available bandwidth is not isotonic, the necessary and sufficient property for consistent hop-by-hop routing. To solve the problem, we introduce an isotonic parameter that captures the avail-able bandwidth metric so that packets can traverse the maximum bandwidth path consistently according to the routing tables constructed in the nodes along the path. To the best of our knowledge, our protocol is the first WMN hop-by-hop routing scheme that can identify bandwidth guaranteed paths.