Load and Interference Aware Routing Metric for WLAN Mesh Networks: Design of a Load and Interference Aware Routing Metric and a Testbed for WLAN Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks recently attract significant interests due to the minimal infrastructure demands and their potential for supporting mobile and pervasive computing. This work introduces a routing scheme to find best performance routes in WLAN mesh networks. A cross-layer approach is used to overcome self-interference issue of existing load-aware routing metrics. The proposed routing metric was evaluated on a multi-hop wireless emulator which allows us to emulate wireless networks on a wired testbed. Design and implementation of AEROMAN (Architecture to Evaluate Routing Protocols for Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks) used in the emulator are presented. AEROMAN is the first, to the best of our knowledge, fully distributed approach taking into account properties of contention-based media access for wireless channel, and does not require any special hardware to emulate wireless channel.