On Multipath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks with Multiple Gateways

Multipath routing has been a promising solution to improving reliability and system throughput for wireless mesh networks. However, existing schemes designed for system throughput improvement suffer the route-coupling problem (i.e., the determined multiple paths originating from the same source node typically stay very close to the shortest path to the gateway) so that the improvement ratio may not be significant. In this paper, we propose a new routing algorithm called two concurrent path routing (2CPR) for wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways. In 2CPR, the routing paths are selected in such a way that the inter-path interference problem is minimized. Therefore, the route-coupling problem can be mitigated. Our proposed 2CPR scheme can be easily integrated with existing link metrics designed for tackling inter-flow interference, and each source node can make routing decision based on local information. The simulation results show that our scheme can outperform existing schemes, demonstrating that it is an excellent routing solution to wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways.