CLEAR: A Cross-Layer Enhanced and Adaptive Routing Framework for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) provide a new and promising solution for broadband Internet services. The distinguishing features and the wide range of WMNs’ applications have attracted both academic and industrial communities. Routing protocols play a crucial role in the functionality and the performance of WMNs due to their direct effect on network throughput, connectivity, supported Quality of Service (QoS) levels, etc. In this paper, a cross-layer based routing framework for multi-interface/multi-channel WMNs, called Cross-Layer Enhanced and Adaptive Routing (CLEAR), is proposed. This framework embodies optimal as well as heuristic solutions. The major component of CLEAR is a new bio-inspired routing protocol called Birds’ Migration Routing protocol (BMR). BMR adopts a newly developed routing metric called Multi-Level Routing metric (MLR) to efficiently utilize the advantages of both multi-radio/multi-channel WMNs and cross-layer design. We also provide an exact solution based on dynamic programming to solve the optimal routing problem in WMNs. Simulation results show that our framework outperforms other routing schemes in terms of network throughput, end-to-end delay, and interference reduction, in addition to being the closest one to the optimal solution.