AODV-HM: A Hybrid Mesh Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently gained increasing attention and have emerged as a technology with great potential for a wide range of applications. WMNs can be considered as a superset of traditional mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), where the network is comprised of mobile client devices MESH_CLIENTs. In addition to MESH_CLIENTs, a WMN can also contain relatively static devices called mesh routers (MESH_ROUTERs). Such hybrid WMN are characterized by a high level of heterogeneity, since static MESH_ROUTERs are typically much less resource constrained than mobile MESH_CLIENTs, and are also often equipped with multiple radio interfaces. Traditional ad-hoc routing protocols do not differentiate between these types of nodes and therefore cannot achieve optimal performance in hybrid WMNs. In this paper, we propose simple extensions to the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which aim to take advantage of the heterogeneity in hybrid WMNs by preferentially routing packets via paths consisting of high capacity MESH_ROUTERs. In addition, we implement a simple channel selection scheme that reduces interference and maximizes channel diversity in multi-radio WMNs. Our simulation results show that in hybrid WMNs, our extensions result in significant performance gains over the standard AODV protocol.