Load-aware cooperative hybrid routing protocol in hybrid wireless mesh networks

Hybrid wireless mesh networks (WMNs) combine the advantages of infrastructure and client mesh networks. Hybrid routing protocols which are the most adaptive types of routing protocols for hybrid WMNs all neglect load condition up till now. This paper proposes a load-aware cooperative hybrid routing protocol (LA-CHRP). LA-CHRP is not only adapted to cover the peculiarities of routers and clients, but also considers load in routing. Different load levels are set for mesh routers and clients respectively. Gateway and client oriented traffic are handled differently. For the former, in the cooperative mechanism, mesh routers can be used more reasonably by considering the load levels. For the latter, node-aware routing metric is used to choose mesh routers in priority, and state of load is also considered for mesh clients. When the energy is adequate, clients with less load are chosen to transport packets. The simulation results indicate that LA-CHRP can achieve high throughput with low latency and packet loss rate in hybrid WMNs. (C) 2017 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.