Best Path to Best Gateway Scheme for Multichannel Multi-interface Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper addresses the problem of optimal gateways selection and route selection to Internet in backbone wireless mesh networks (WMNs) where each mesh router (MR) is equipped with multiple radio interfaces and a subset of nodes serve as gateways to Internet. Several schemes have been proposed to route packets in WMNs or to select appropriate gateways to connect clients to Internet. However, most of these schemes consider packet loss, interferences, load at gateways, or ETX (Expected Transmission Count) as routing metrics; only a few schemes consider two some of these metrics at the same time. In this paper, we propose an efficient gateway and path selection scheme, called BP2BG (Best Path to Best Gateway), that takes into account load at gateways, ETX and interferences in order to select best path to best gateway. Simulation results show that BP2BG can significantly improve the overall network performance compared to schemes using either ETX, nearest gateway (i.e., shortest path to gateway), load at gateways or interferences as metrics for path and gateway selection.