MRS: A Simple Cross-Layer Heuristic to Improve Throughput Capacity in Wireless Mesh Networks

International audienceWireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an emerging architecture based on multi-hop transmission. ISPs considers WMNs as a potential future technology to offer broadband Internet access. Therefore, in WMNs, the throughput capacity of the wireless backbone becomes a key factor, limiting the scalability in terms of users able to effectively take advantage of the network. Increasing the effective throughput capacity will support WMNs become a very cost-effective solution for wireless ISPs.Based on the analysis of the theoretical capacity bound derived by Gupta et al., we propose MRS (Mesh Routing Strategy), a novel cross layer routing solution. MRS is specifically designed for Wireless Mesh Networks, where routing is challenging due to the unreliable wireless medium. Traditional routing paradigms are not able to overcome this issue, resulting in an average throughput experienced by the network far lower than the theoretical throughput capacity bound. This paper shows how a cross-layer approach will consistently improve the throughput experienced by large-scale multi-hop networks. We show through simulation that our proposal increases throughput while reducing the average transmitted power. Furthermore, MRS limits interference and gets closer to the theoretical throughput capacity bound