Performance Comparison of Route Metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks

When designing the route metrics for wireless mesh networks, we can improve network capacity by considering the traffic load, the link loss rate, and the medium contention. In this letter, we propose as the route metrics for wireless mesh networks the number of contention nodes that reflects both the traffic load and the medium contention as well as the aggregated traffic bandwidth that reflects the traffic load. To the best of our knowledge, no studies to date have compared the performances of route metrics with different features in the wireless mesh network. We therefore compared the performances of the proposed route metrics and the existing route metrics of the hop count and the expected transmission count to reflect the link loss rate. Simulation results show that the proposed route metrics perform better than the existing route metrics.