Local heuristic for the refinement of multi-path routing in wireless mesh networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a local heuristic for refining multi-path routing in wireless mesh networks, improving throughput and traffic distribution by using only local information, applicable to existing routing algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel local heuristic that refines existing multi-path routes in wireless mesh networks, enhancing throughput and traffic balance.

Findings

Improves average network throughput across different MAC settings.

Enhances traffic distribution uniformity when refining multi-path routes.

Works effectively with existing routing protocols like AODV and OLSR.

Abstract

We consider wireless mesh networks and the problem of routing end-to-end traffic over multiple paths for the same origin-destination pair with minimal interference. We introduce a heuristic for path determination with two distinguishing characteristics. First, it works by refining an extant set of paths, determined previously by a single- or multi-path routing algorithm. Second, it is totally local, in the sense that it can be run by each of the origins on information that is available no farther than the node's immediate neighborhood. We have conducted extensive computational experiments with the new heuristic, using AODV and OLSR, as well as their multi-path variants, as underlying routing methods. For two different CSMA settings (as implemented by 802.11) and one TDMA setting running a path-oriented link scheduling algorithm, we have demonstrated that the new heuristic is capable of improving the average throughput network-wide. When working from the paths generated by the multi-path routing algorithms, the heuristic is also capable to provide a more evenly distributed traffic pattern.