A novel cross layer routing and interface assignment in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Network

In this paper, we propose a joint problem of routing and interface assignment for Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) to improve the performance of the network. WMNs have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid deployment, low cost, instant communication capabilities and support for many types of application. But, the real-time multimedia applications require quality of service (QoS) support for effective communication. For these applications, network congestion is the main reason for lower throughput and longer delay. So, we designed a novel cross layer routing metric called Interference and Congestion Aware (ICA) metric by considering Re-transmission count (RTC) from mac layer, congestion at different interfaces of each node and intra-flow interference to find the optimal path. The unique feature of ICA metric is that it uses passive monitoring and does not incur any control overhead. Later, we extend the work by prioritizing the network traffic by assigning different interfaces to different traffics like video, audio and data by considering the load on each interface and thus providing good QoS. The results reveal that our joint approach performs better in terms of throughput, average end-to-end delay and packet delivery fraction than existing routing metric WCETT.