Wireless Bonding for Maximizing Throughput in Multi-Radio Mesh Networks

Abstract

To enhance the per node throughput, mesh nodes in wireless mesh networks can be equipped with multiple network interfaces (NIC). In this paper, we propose a new multi-interface equipped architecture, named "wireless bonding (WBond)", which enables each node to fully utilize all its available interfaces, resulting in increased throughput. The proposed WBond provides a method for exposing a single virtual interface by bonding multiple NICs. When a node needs to transfer a packet, WBond selects one among the multiple interfaces depending upon the channel quality assigned to each interface. A novel method for measuring channel quality, called as "ChanQual", is presented and used by the WBond with high accuracy and no additional overhead. Comparison studies using ns-2 simulations show that our WBond scheme can achieve the most reliable and highest performance (i.e., network throughput) compared to traditional multi-interface architectures