Hop-by-Hop Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks with Bandwidth Guarantees

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become an important edge network to provide Internet access to remote areas and wireless connections in a metropolitan scale. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying the maximum available bandwidth path, a fundamental issue in supporting quality-of-service in WMNs. Due to interference among links, bandwidth, a well-known bottleneck metric in wired networks, is neither concave nor additive in wireless networks. We propose a new path weight which captures the available path bandwidth information. We formally prove that our hop-by-hop routing protocol based on the new path weight satisfies the consistency and loop-freeness requirements. The consistency property guarantees that each node makes a proper packet forwarding decision, so that a data packet does traverse over the intended path. Our extensive simulation experiments also show that our proposed path weight outperforms existing path metrics in identifying high-throughput paths.