Cross-Layer QoS-aware routing protocol for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a Cross-Layer QoS-aware routing protocol based on OLSR (CLQ-OLSR) to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently exploiting multi-radio and multi-channel method. By constructing multi-layer virtual logical mapping over physical topology, we design two sets of routing mechanisms: physical modified OLSR protocol (M-OLSR) and logical routing, to accommodate network traffic. By piggybacking bandwidth information in HELLO and Topology Control (TC) messages, each node disseminates topology and bandwidth information in the whole network. Simulation experiments on QualNet demonstrate that the proposed CLQ-OLSR outperforms single radio OLSR (SR-OLSR), multi-radio OLSR (MR-OLSR) and OLSR with Differentiated Services (DiffServ) in terms of network aggregate throughput, end-to-end packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and end-to end delay jitter with reasonable message overheads and hardware costs. In particular, the network aggregate throughput for CLQ-OLSR can almost improve by 300% compared with the single radio case.