Multipath Selection in Multi-radio Mesh Networks

Abstract

Research has shown that multi-radio multi-channel mesh networks provide significant capacity gains over single-radio mesh networks. Traditional single path routing can lead to poor utilization of the available channels in these networks. Opportunistic multipath routing can better exploit the available channel diversity in a multi-radio network. The goal of this paper is to select multiple paths that, when used concurrently, provide high end-to-end throughput. To this end, we present a metric for multipath selection in multi-radio networks. We evaluate the metric through simulations in Qualnet and show that intelligent multipath routing significantly outperforms single path routing in multi-radio mesh networks.