An efficient routing protocol for point-to-point elastic traffic in wireless mesh networks

Most studies on WMNs have assumed that all network traffic from clients goes through a gateway node. However, point-to-point traffic is expected to significantly contribute to WMN network load in many scenarios. In this paper we propose a novel routing strategy that seeks to alleviate network congestion by avoiding paths that are already heavily loaded. Our scheme effectively takes into account the elastic nature of TCP traffic when calculating the paths that balance network load. Furthermore, to mitigate the flow unfairness that affects TCP-like traffic in multi-hop environments, we avoid that single-hop flows fully utilize link resources, starving other multi-hop flows sharing the same links. We have implemented and tested the proposed routing protocol on a 10-node wireless mesh testbed. Our experiments show that the proposed scheme outperforms OLSR both in terms of average throughput and fairness.