EFW: A cross-layer metric for reliable routing in wireless mesh networks with selfish participants

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a flexible and low-cost network infrastructure, where heterogeneous mesh routers managed by different users collaborate to extend network coverage. Several routing protocols have been proposed to improve the packet delivery rate based on enhanced metrics that capture the wireless link quality. However, these metrics do not take into account that some participants can exhibit selfish behavior by selectively dropping packets sent by other mesh routers in order to prioritize their own traffic and increase their network utilization. This paper proposes a novel routing metric to cope with the problem of selfish behavior (i.e., packet dropping) of mesh routers in a WMN. Our solution combines, in a cross-layer fashion, routing-layer observations of forwarding behavior with MAC-layer measurements of wireless link quality to select the most reliable and high-performance path. We integrated the proposed metric with a well-known routing protocol for wireless mesh networks, OLSR, and evaluated it using the NS2 simulator. The results show that our cross-layer metric accurately captures the path reliability, even when a high percentage of network nodes misbehave, thus considerably increasing the WMN performance.