Routing Metrics for Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-radio wireless mesh networks provide a great improvement over traditional mobile ad-hoc networks and are able to provide increased capacity and scalability. Routing metrics for multi-radio wireless mesh networks must cater to the specific characteristics that these networks exhibit and attempt to exploit these to maximize performance. Many routing metrics were designed for single-radio ad-hoc networks and hence do not perform well in multi-radio mesh networks. In this paper, we provide a survey of recently proposed routing metrics for multi-radio mesh networks. We also provide an overview of the most relevant single-radio metrics, since they typically form the basis of multi-radio metrics. For our survey, we identify the key components from which multi-radio metrics are constructed. We also provide a list of key criteria, which forms the basis of our qualitative comparison of routing metrics for multi-radio mesh networks.