Cost-aware route selection in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks have emerged to be one of the promising applications of ad hoc networks. The idea of installing multiple radio interfaces at each mesh router allows a mesh network to better utilize the available wireless bandwidth, but at the same time complicates the issue of route selection. In this paper, we propose a novel metric that measures the bandwidth and cost ratio of each route. Based on this metric, a Cost-Aware Route Selection (CARS) scheme is proposed to improve the overall throughput of a mesh network. The simulation results confirm that our scheme is able to better utilize the limited wireless resource and improves the overall network throughput by more than 95% with different types of traffic and communication patterns when it is compared against the past route selection schemes.