An efficient routing strategy for performance improvement in WMNs

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) propose themselves as a network architecture suitable for a wide range of applications, very versatile, rather cheap and easy to deploy. The capability of clients to forward information among each other, thus implementing a Hybrid WMN, allows to extend the network coverage and makes them suitable for the information delivery in Intelligent Transportation Systems and in Public Safety applications. The increase of the network size, i.e. of the number of nodes and of available access points for the clients, and its division into routing domains with different characteristics, raises the problem of different paths for upstream and downstream flows in the same conversation. Such routing asymmetry often leads to a waste of the radio resources shared among clients and, consequently, to reduction of network performances. In this paper we propose a strategy for an efficient interconnection of the client network with the backbone, in order to minimize the asymmetry of paths. The presented solution does not depend on a specific routing protocol and involves only the boundary devices, thus requiring a low effort for its implementation. A peculiar feature of our work is experimental validation through a testbed consisting of real world devices; the obtained results show an improvement in network performances for the involved nodes, evaluated in terms of network delay and network throughput.