Interference-based routing in multi-hop wireless infrastructures

In this paper, multi-hop wireless infrastructures are identified as a way to increase user data rates and/or capacity of wireless systems by means of a high base station density without high base station interconnection costs. For such a system, a new routing algorithm, named balanced interference routing algorithm (BIRA), is proposed. One of the main features of this new routing algorithm is to take the interference between wirelessly transmitting nodes into account. In BIRA, a link cost is calculated considering the interference level of a node and a fixed cost for each link. Based on this link cost, the Dijkstra algorithm is used to compute routes. This article introduces BIRA and presents a performance analysis, both for the case where data are flowing in two directions to and from the fixed network, and for the case where data are only flowing in the direction of the fixed network. From the performance analysis, we see that BIRA outperforms other algorithms in terms of obtained data rates for a given available spectrum. BIRA helps to reduce the interference in the network and to achieve higher throughput. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.