Load and Energy Aware Hybrid Routing Protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Effective routing protocols considering network features can improve network performance dramatically. As hybrid wireless mesh network (WMN) is composed of static mesh routers and mobile mesh clients, hybrid routing protocol fits hybrid WMN well. However, the existing hybrid routing protocols designed for hybrid WMN do not fully consider the regional network condition, and as a result cannot effectively improve network performance as a whole. In this paper, a load and energy aware hybrid routing protocol (LE-HRP) is proposed. In LE-HRP, gateway- and client-oriented traffic are considered respectively. The queuing delay which can measure the load condition is taken into account in both traffic types. In the process of calculating delay, both physical and logical interferences are considered. In addition, for client- oriented traffic, as energy of mesh clients is limited, in addition to reducing delay, the energy efficiency is also improved in the meantime. A mesh client with low energy can still be used if it can help the network reduce the delay significantly and sufficiently. Otherwise, a mesh client with more residual energy will be chosen. Simulation results through NS3 show that LE- HRP achieves better network performance.