High throughput path selection for IEEE 802.11s based Wireless Mesh Networks

The IEEE 802.11s draft is the first attempt to develop a standard fully intended for the rapidly growing Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Performance of a WMN is largely affected by the design of routing protocol and the associ-ated metric. The recent version D2.02 of 802.11s has de-fined Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) and Airtime as the default path selection protocol and metric, respec-tively. However, Airtime and other well known existing rout-ing metrics do not consider the impact of backoff delay and queueing delay, and hence, ignored some important factors like transmission time of the contending nodes, their loads and densities which might hinder the network performance. In this paper, we first identify the parameters that affect the forwarding time of a packet and then, design a new routin