Diamond-Shaped Mesh Network Routing with Cross-Layer Design to Explore the Benefits of Multi-Beam Smart Antennas

Conventional wireless mesh network (WMN)routing protocols are designed for the nodes that use the omni-directional or single-beam directional antennas. This research presents a throughput-efficient routing scheme for WMN, by taking advantage of the nodes equipped with the multi-beam directional antennas (MBDAs). Our routing design has the following two novel features: First, it is a cross-layer design by integrating the routing scheme with multi-beam oriented medium access control (MAC) scheme. Second, the routing topology has a diamond-like shape and uses the multi-path routes (i.e., one main path and a few side paths). The diamond shape makes the traffic converge and diverge periodically in the routing paths, which exploits the simultaneous data delivery capability of multi-beam antennas, and enhances the network throughput. Our simulation results demonstrate the high throughput efficiency of the proposed multi-beam routing scheme.