A Cross Layer Routing Metric for Gateway Aware Routing in Wireless Mesh Network

In this paper, we propose novel cross-layer routing metric that elegantly balances the load among the different gateways in a Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). WMNs are evolving to be the key technology of the future. These networks are normally used to provide low-cost internet service to a large community of users like rural areas. In these networks, Internet Gateway (IGW) which acts as a central point of internet attachment for the mesh routers is likely to be a potential bottleneck because of its limited wireless link capacity. Thus, we need the mechanisms to collect information about the available gateways and choose optimal path. There are two schemes to choose optimal paths through gateways: using gateway discovery schemes and using routing metric. In our work, we address the problem of finding the optimal path and load balancing using a new routing metric. Our metric considers the packet loss, received signal strength, protocol interference model and load at gateways to estimate the link quality and hence chooses the most optimal path avoiding congestion and hence improving the network capacity. We implemented this metric in well-known proactive routing protocol Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR). We use ns-2.34 to evaluate the proposed scheme and we observe that the proposed scheme perform better in terms of throughput and average end-to-end delay compared Load Aware Expected Transmission Time (LAETT).