Comparative Study of Interference-Aware Routing Metrics in WMN

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is infrastructure based, low cost, easily deployable technology that will soon revolutionize the statusquo in network communications. Routing in WMN has been a hotbed of research in the recent years. Routing protocols are responsible for the discovery, establishment and maintenance of routes through which communication occurs. The protocols consider various features of the network, termed as routing metric to select optimum path for communication. Simple path selection metrics do not consider the link quality aware features like power awareness or interference awareness. Better paths can be obtained if such qualities of the wireless link are considered in routing metric. In this paper, we identify the importance of routing metrics and discuss the characteristics that should be part of the design of routing metrics. We further conduct comparison study of three interference aware routing metrics used in multi-radio multichannel (MRMC) wireless mesh networks; WCETT, MIC and iAWARE.