Flexible Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

In this thesis, we introduce a flexible routing to cope with network dynamics for multi-hop wireless mesh networks -- FMR (Flexible Multipath Routing Protocol). We propose a new scheme to accurately distribute traffic among multiple paths based on the efficient measurement quality of multiple paths without periodical probing message. We define a new metric, ECT (Expected Consumption Time). It is used to estimate path quality accurately and perform status decision. When a status at a node changes only, the node generates and sends a REPORT message to the source node including its variance of status. FMR does not need to generate expensive periodical probing message. As a result, it can obtain significant improvement of throughput and reduces end-to-end delay effectively. Results of performance evaluation by NS-2 demonstrate improvements of the proposed scheme