CAMR: Congestion-Aware Multi-Path Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop wireless network consisting of mesh routers and clients, where the mesh routers have minimal mobility and form the backbone. The WMN is primarily designed to access outer network to mesh clients through backhaul gateways. As traffic converges on the gateways, traffic hotspots are likely to form in the neighborhood of the gateways. In this paper, we propose Congestion Aware Multi-path Routing (CAMR) protocol to tackle this problem. Upon congestion, CAMR divides the clients under a mesh STA into two groups and returns a different path for each group. The CAMR protocol triggers multi-path routing in such a manner that the packet reordering problem is avoided. Through simulations, we show that CAMR improves the performance of the WMN in terms of throughput, delay and packet drop ratio.