CRADLE: Cross-Layer Design for Load-Aware Routing in IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Mesh and Sensor Networks

To address issues in interference, load-imbalance, contention and congestion in wireless mesh and sensor networks, previous work employed load adaptive routing based on load sensitive routing metrics. These proposals were able to prove their usefulness, however only through simulations and theoretical computations. Worse, most of these metrics were either complex to compute or required neighbor-wide collection and advertisement of link-layer statistics that add overhead in the computation of routes. Other proposals are hard if not impossible to capture in actual existing wireless devices. To address these limitations our goal is two-fold. First, obtain an accurate load-aware routing metric based on simple computations and node-local information. Second, lay out a design that is easy to implement on existing technologies. Accordingly, we present a cross layer design called CRADLE that accomplishes these goals. Actual deployment shows CRADLE significantly improves network performance in both end-to-end throughput and packet delay against competing metrics defaultly installed in wireless mesh devices.