Energy Aware Routing in IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networking is a continuous growing technology that can be used used for several application scenarios, such as military tactical operations, etc. in next generation wireless networks. The IEEE 802.11s Standard defines the procedures that wireless nodes follow in order to interconnect and create a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) mesh network. It, also, defines the routing protocol and the metric that are used by a IEEE 802.11s mesh network to route data. However, although the energy consumption of mesh nodes is a crucial parameter for the network's lifetime in specific purpose operations (e.g. military and health) the default metric proposed by the standard doesn't take into account the energy of the nodes. In this paper, a new energy — aware routing metric for the IEEE 802.11s mesh networks has been implemented. Simulation results showed that the proposed metric prolongs the lifetime of a WMN in comparison with the the default metric used by IEEE 802.11s Standard while causing a little higher total delay in the network.