Hybrid routing protocol to decrease delay and to extend lifetime for mesh networks

Mesh networks consist of wireless nodes each of which can act as a router to relay packets for others without any preset infrastructure. These networks have a hierarchical topology. The upper layer is the backbone of the network formed by the mesh routers. Each mesh router acts as a local controller for some mesh clients, which form the lower layer of the mesh network. This study addresses the important challenges in mesh networks and proposes a hybrid routing protocol to reduce delay in routing discovery across the whole network and to improve energy efficiency of the mesh clients in the lower layer. This hybrid routing protocol applies a proactive protocol to the mesh router layer with the stationary mesh routers that have sufficient necessary resources such as energy and applies a reactive routing protocol to the mesh client layer to improve the energy efficiency by using the proposed average residual energy rule and the minimum residual energy rule. Simulation results show that this hybrid routing protocol reduces delay in routing discovery and improves energy efficiency of mesh clients. © 2007 Asian Network for Scientific Information.