Load-balanced routing for mesh networks

Abstract

Due to the static nature of nodes, in mesh networks, a poor choice of paths may remain unchanged for a long time and create hot spots. Hence, it is very important to design path weight functions (also called routing metrics) to facilitate load-balanced routing in mesh networks. Such path weight functions (PWFs) must reflect the shared nature of wireless channels and support easy calculation of loop-free paths. In this abstract, we present our theoretical studies of the requirements on PWFs and design the first PWF, called Metric of Interference and Channel-switching (MIC) , that satisfies these requirements. Our simulation results show that MIC's performance is substantially better than existing PWFs. (See our technical report [5] for more details.)