A new MIMC routing protocol compatible with IEEE 802.11s based WLAN mesh networks

Utilizing multi-interfaces and multi-channels (MIMC) is essential in increasing capacity and performance of emerging wireless mesh networks. However, the current IEEE 802.11s draft which is a standardization activity of the WLAN based mesh network does not sufficiently consider these capabilities. This may lead to poor performance of the network in terms of throughput and scalability. In this paper, first we analyze the misbehavior of the current standard especially in the path selection process. Then, we propose a new routing protocol that is suitable for the multi-interface and multi-channel environment. The proposed scheme selects high throughput paths based on channel diversity information and reduces the broadcast overhead of control messages. Moreover, it is fully compatible with Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) which is the default routing protocol proposed in the current standard. Interestingly, in the simulation study, we observe that the network performance increases even though only a partial number of nodes are equipped with the proposed scheme.