A framework of distributed dynamic multi-radio multi-channel multi-path routing protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have gained a lot of attention recently. Many efforts are made to design proper routing protocols for WMNs. Existing multi-radio multi-channel routing protocols utilize only one path for transmission, and some multi-path routing protocols consider only single channel situation, in which multi-path routing won't improve end-to-end throughput efficiently. In our paper, we propose a framework for distributed reactive routing protocol in WMNs, which utilizes multi-radio multi-channel technique, as well as multi-path transmission strategy. Dynamic channel assignment is used to avoid the inter-flow and intra-flow channel competition and interference. Our protocol establishes and maintains two or more channel-dimensional disjoint paths, and then every data flow is splitted into multiple paths, in order to increase the total end-to-end transmission throughput. Demo and NS2 simulations are carried out for the evaluation of the performance of our proposed protocol comparing with AODV and other related routing protocols. It is shown our proposal can increase end-to-end throughput significantly.