Layer-2.5 Routing in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

The availability of cost-effective wireless network interface cards has recently made it possible to equip wireless mesh routers with multiple interfaces. The problem how to assign channels to those interfaces has been consequently studied and shown to be strictly related to the routing problem. In a previous work, we have proposed a Layer-2.5 forwarding paradigm for multi-radio wireless mesh networks and claimed its potential for desirable features such as high throughput, fast recovery against node/link failures and high robustness to variation in the traffic demands. In this paper, we show that such features are not easily achieved by a traditional destination-based routing protocol. For this purpose, we had to: (i) design a technique to compute proper link weights, and (ii) develop a modified version of AODV, named AODV-MLW, which is able to use arbitrary link weights. The thorough performance evaluation studies we carried out actually show that our Layer-2.5 forwarding paradigm outperforms a traditional destination-based routing protocol.