Uniform description of interference and load based routing metric for wireless mesh networks

Routing metrics help calculate optimal path from source node to destination node; it is the key for the whole network performances and needs to be carefully designed. Existing routing metrics independently describe intra-flow interference and inter-flow interference, so measures should be taken to make the component that describes the intra-flow interference around the same value range as that describes the inter-flow interference. These measures will complicate the design of routing metrics or introduce adjustable parameters, but how to adjust the parameters based on network status is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose an isotonic routing metric, called MIL (metric based on uniform description of interference and load), which uniformly describes factors including physical interference, logical intra-flow and inter-flow interference, and node load. MIL can detect and avoid heavy load and heavy interference areas in the network, and it can guide packets to reach destinations with low end-to-end delay. As byproduct, a channel diversity expression is also proposed to reflect channel distribution along paths. Simulations show that MIL outperforms some existing well-known routing metrics.