Integrated routing system for wireless mesh networks

Recently Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become popular especially for its low cost deployment in the areas of poor network infrastructure and terrain of difficult deployment. Although paths in WMN backbone network are stable, the access link contention can severely constrain the end-to-end throughput. We proposed an integrated routing system for WMN that exploits both paths through the backbone network and through the ad-hoc access network of mobile nodes. The ad-hoc path is considered as an alternative path and is used only when the primary backbone path is severely constrained due to access links contention. We have shown through simulation that alternative path is effective in delivering higher throughput in that situation. We also proposed a scheme for initiating the route discovery of the ad-hoc path. The main contributions of this thesis are two algorithms that allow the mobile node to evaluate the throughput of the backbone and ad-hoc paths, and to make a decision of taking one path. The proposed algorithms are implemented in OPNET simulator, and network performance is studied under variety of conditions.