EFT: A high throughput routing metric for IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we present a throughput-maximizing routing metric, referred to as expected forwarding time (EFT), for IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks. Our study reveals that most of the existing routing metrics select the paths with minimum aggregate transmission time of a packet. However, we show by analyses that, due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, other factors, such as transmission time of the contending nodes and their densities and loads, also affect the performance of routing metrics. We therefore first identify the factors that hinder the forwarding time of a packet. Furthermore, we add a new dimension to our metric by introducing traffic priority into our routing metric design, which, to the best of our knowledge, is completely unaddressed by existing studies. We also show how EFT can be incorporated into the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP), the path selection protocol used in the IEEE 802.11s draft standard. Finally, we study the performance of EFT through simulations under different network scenarios. Simulation results show that EFT outperforms other routing metrics in terms of average network throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet loss rate.