Transmissions failures and load-balanced routing metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks play an important role in the next production wireless communication systems as it can support broadband services with omnipresent coverage and low transmission power with high capacity and high processing power. The efficiency of mesh networks is further improved by a routing path determination mechanism that considers most of the causes of transmissions failures. Our proposed routing metric takes into account transmissions failures by considering the backoff mechanism used in IEEE 802.11 networks and assign weights to each path. These weights act as a metric in route selection among different paths. The proposed scheme further utilizes this metric to provide load balancing. Consequently this metric helps the routing protocols to balance traffic and avoids traffic through congested paths.