Delay- and Interference-Aware Routing for Wireless Mesh Network

Effective routing design can significantly improve the whole network performance. In order to achieve the global best network performance, the problem of routing can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. A delay- and interference-aware routing (DIAR) method using optimization is proposed in this article to find effective routes in a wireless mesh network. With the rapid development of wireless communication, next-generation networks urge shorter delay. DIAR aims at selecting routes with minimum end-to-end delay for several concurrent data flows. Delay is derived according to interference, bandwidth, and the probability of transmission failure. Then, the relationship between delay and the number of interfering nodes is built for the first time, which makes the estimation of delay more simple. When solving the optimization problem, an improved genetic algorithm is proposed to balance load. Besides, DIAR considers dynamic network condition caused by selecting different paths to transmit packets and evaluates the network condition while finding the solution of routing. The paths with least end-to-end delay will be finally chosen as the solution. Simulation results show that DIAR can obtain better network performance.