2015 Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 221-228
WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks) using IEEE 802.11 have been deeply studied to extend the area of coverage of the Internet. A typical approach to implement this kind of WMNs is to use dynamic metrics (e.g., ETX) over link-state routing protocols (e.g., OLSR). Although studies have demonstrated clarified that the approach performs well, there is still room for improve. In this paper, we first point out that the dynamic metrics by nature cannot pursuit rapid change in link quality, which prevents routing protocols to choose the best forwarding paths at every moment. To complement this drawback of the dynamic metric, we propose a local switching mechanism of forwarding channels for multi-radio, multi-channel WMNs, which works in combination with dynamic metrics. Our evaluation showed that the proposed method improves throughput and stability of communications when it works with dynamic metrics.
