A Routing Metric and Algorithm for IEEE802.16 Mesh Networks

The rapid growth of high-speed multimedia services for mobile, residential and small business customers has created an increasing demand for last mile broadband access. The wireless broadband connectivity to the Internet is becoming increasingly available as an alternative to traditional wired technologies in cities across the globe and have the potential to fulfill the vision to high-speed broadband access to all. Technologies based on 802.16 promises to deliver high data rates over large distances and deliver multimedia services and are expected to play a major role in high speed broadband delivery even beyond the current 3rd Generation wireless technologies. The mesh mode of this standard have the potential of increasing the coverage well beyond the cities and into the rural areas that are currently not served by existing technologies. This paper focuses on the potential of the mesh mode of this standard and proposes a routing algorithm that is suitable for coordinated distributed scheduling.