Randomized Single-Path Flow Routing on SDN-Aware Wi-Fi Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wi-Fi Mesh Networks (WMNs) as a popular platform can be used for the construction of dynamic backhaul networks especially over small cells, which is an indispensable part of the 5G technology. Finding the optimal single-path flow routing solution over the multi-hop backhaul networks is a classic NP-hard problem and there are non-trivial drawbacks such as packet re-ordering to implement multi-path routing as a practical solution. However, Software Defined Networking (SDN) as an emerging paradigm can provide a great opportunity to implement fast and efficient solutions for routing the network flows over WMNs. In this paper, we propose a randomized single-path flow routing that can be applied to SDN-aware WMNs. The randomized nature of our introduced solution avoids the complexities of implementing a multi-path flow routing and it presents a viable routing scheme that guarantees certain performance bounds. In addition, it considers the key characteristics of wireless networks and it can be employed for multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. Through numerical results, we have shown that our solution follows the theoretical, tighter and more general performance bounds. Moreover, in contrast to most of the prior studies, the performance of the proposed solution is not only evaluated through a real testbed (in terms of the aggregated throughput and protocol overhead) but also compared with some of the most popular WMN routing protocols.