Interference-aware routing for multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks

Interference is a major factor that limits the performance of wireless networks. In this work, we present a practical IEEE-802.11-based routing model that captures the dynamic effects of interference in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). This is achieved by accurately modeling wireless link capacities in the presence of any number of interferers in a WMN. Our goal is to maximize the network throughput by routing the traffic of all source-destination pairs over the best possible set of routes. We study our methods on two sample networks: a grid WMN and a practical WMN (the Kemper Hall wireless network). In each example, we compare the performance of the proposed routing model with the standard Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), a popular routing protocol. The aggregate network throughput achieved by our model is significantly higher than that achieved by OSPF. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.