EFT: a high throughput routing metric for IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks

Abstract In this paper, we present a throughput-maximizing routing metric, referred to as expected for-warding time (EFT), for IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks. Our study reveals that most of the existing routing metrics select the paths with minimum aggregate transmission time of a packet. However, we show by analyses that, due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, other factors, such as transmission time of the contending nodes and their densities and loads, also affect the performance of routing metrics. We therefore first identify the factors that hinder the forwarding time of a packet. Furthermore, we add a new dimension to our metric by introducing traffic pri-ority into our routing metric design, which, to the best of our knowledge, is completely unaddressed by exist-ing studies. We also show how EFT can be incorporated into the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP), th