A Hybrid Centralized Routing Protocol for 802.11s WMNs

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are being widely accepted as a critical wireless access solution for various applications. Due to minimal mobility in mesh nodes, a backbone topology can be effectively maintained in WMN using a proactive routing protocol. In IEEE 802.11s standard, a tree-based routing (TBR) protocol is adopted as a viable proactive routing protocol for a WMN with user traffic flowing to/from a wired network through a root (i.e., a mesh portal). However, the performance of the TBR protocol degrades rapidly as the user traffic becomes dominated by intra-mesh traffic. The reason is that the routing path through the root even for intra-mesh traffic unnecessarily overloads the root. Furthermore, the TBR performance becomes more severe when the network size of WMN is large, which could lead to the huge amount of intra-mesh traffic towards the root. To overcome these problems, we propose a new routing mechanism, root driven routing (RDR) protocol, for the root to quickly determine the best-metric route for any source-destination pair of intra-mesh traffic. For inter-mesh traffic, the original TBR protocol is employed. Thus, the hybrid centralized routing protocol that combines TBR and RDR and is adaptive to all traffic scenarios. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed RDR protocol outperforms the TBR protocol with much lower average end-to-end delay and much higher packet delivery ratio for intra-mesh traffic. The simulation results also provide some insight into the right tradeoff between the TBR protocol and the RDR protocol to achieve the best performance of the hybrid centralized routing protocol for WMNs.