Research Article Contention- and Interference-Aware Flow-Based Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks: Design and Evaluation of a Novel Routing Metric

Copyright © 2010 Miguel Catalan-Cid et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. As the popularity of IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) grows, end users of these environments demand better performance and quality of service (QoS). However, the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the IEEE 802.11 standard was not initially designed to provide either multihop or QoS capabilities. Therefore, the performance of IEEE 802.11-based WMNs is not optimal. One approach that can mitigate the limitations of IEEE 802.11-based WMNs relies on routing flows through appropriate paths according to: (i) the characteristics of the flows, (ii) the quality of the WMN links, (iii) the contention in transmission, and (iv) the interference in reception. Considerable research effort has been devoted to this topic. However, as we argue in this paper, a comprehensive solution is still needed. This paper presents the Weighted Contention and Interference routing Metric (WCIM). Extensive simulation results show that WCIM outperforms state-of-the-art solutions. 1