Hierarchical Cluster Based Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks Using Group Head

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the path selection protocol has various issues like power consumption, congestion control, load balance and message collision. Till now various approaches have been proposed to mitigate the problems of path selection protocols. To reduce message collision, power consumption and congestion a new hierarchical clustering approach is proposed in this work. This approach divided Mesh Points (MPs) into different domains and these domains are further divided into different clusters. Each domain contains one MP as a group head (GH) and each cluster contains one MP as a cluster head (CH). Mesh Point Portal (MPP) acts as a root node and communicates only with GHs. GHs communicate only with those CHs which are under the same domain. In Proposed Approach, For route discovery by source MP, instead of broadcasting the route request (RREQ) to all neighbors MPs, RREQ is unicast to CH. Through this way, first route discovery is done at a lower level and if a route is not found then it forwards to upper level, i.e., to GH and then MPP. GH works in between MPP and CH. Hence GHs balance the load of MPP by increasing one more level of path selection hierarchy. In the proposed approach, path selection protocol mostly uses unicast method or multicast method. This helps communication in such a way that the network has less message collisions, less power consumption and less congestion.