A Dynamic Programming Approach for Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

The routing problem in wireless mesh networks is concerned with finding "good" source-destination paths. It generally faces multiple objectives to be optimized, such as i) path capacity, which accounts for the bits per second that can be sent along the path connecting the source to the destination node, and ii) end-to-end delay. This paper presents the mesh routing algorithm (MRA), a dynamic programming approach to compute high-capacity paths while simultaneously bounding the end-to-end delay. The proposed algorithm also provides the option of routing through multiple link-disjoint paths, such that the amount of traffic through each path is proportional to its capacity. Simulation results show that MRA outperforms other common techniques in terms of path capacity, while at the same time bounding the end-to-end delay to a desired value.