Critical Insight into Design of Routing Metrics in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs)

The increasing demand for communication elsewhere and also guaranteed QoS have led to the emergence of easily deployable, versatile and inexpensive next generation technologies. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been envisaged as an essential network architecture for the next generation wireless networking. WMNs have emerged as one solution to extend the network coverage in multi-hop communication network. Mesh networks provide the advantage of working without the need of an infrastructure. However, routing in multi-hop wireless mesh networks is a complex research subject owing to the various issues in simultaneous transmissions, e.g., interference, self-interference, etc. Furthermore, the existing routing metrics assume that all applications running in the internet have the same requirement ignoring the fact that different applications have different characteristics. In this paper, wireless mesh networks have been discussed together with their potential applications. The existing routing protocols used in WMNs and the routing metrics which form the basis of these protocols, have been deliberated upon. Moreover, the pros and cons of routing metrics have been mentioned explicitly which should be considered in designing routing metrics to improve the network performance in future discourse.