HCRL: A new routing protocol for multi-interface wireless mesh network

Routing is one of the key technologies of wireless mesh networks. Current routing algorithms generally define a routing metric with some parameters by taking their weighted average. However, the weight is not easy to value in practice and now the parameters needed are not usually supported by drivers of commercial wireless cards either. In this paper, we comprehensively consider hop counts, channel similarity, received signal strength, link residual capacity, and propose HCRL routing protocol. The simulation results obtained in the multi-interface wireless mesh network testbed show that HCRL protocol can effectively improve network performance and avoid network congestion.