Multi-hop routing for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh networks have the potential to provide inexpensive and quick access to the internet for military communications, surveillance, education, healthcare and disaster management. This work caters to the growing high- bandwidth demands by providing low delay and high throughput by designing efficient, robust routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks. Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation describe adaptive routing algorithms that opportunistically route the packets in the absence of reliable knowledge about channel statistics and the network model. We design two adaptive routing algorithms, Distributed Opportunistic Routing (d-AdaptOR) and No Regret Routing (NRR), which minimize the expected number of transmissions and thus improving the throughput. The remainder of the dissertation concerns with the design routing algorithms to avoid congestion in the network. In Chapter 4, we describe a Distributed Opportunistic Routing algorithm with Congestion Diversity (ORCD) which employs receiver diversity and minimizes end-end delay. In Chapter 5, we present the Congestion Diversity Protocol (CDP), a distributed routing protocol for 802.11-based multi-hop wireless networks that combines important aspects of shortest-path and back-pressure routing to achieve improved end-end delay performance. This work reports on a practical (hardware and software) implementation of CDP in an indoor Wi-Fi testbe