Disjoint Path Routing for Multi-Channel Multi-Interface Wireless Mesh Network

Dynamic Channel Switching System (DCSS) has been proposed as a solution to improve the capacity of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) which is compliant with IEEE 802.11 standards. DCSS divides wireless interfaces into data receiving and data sending interfaces. The receiving interfaces stay on specified channels, while the sending interfaces can be switched as necessary. A node sends the data by switching the sending interface to the channel assigned to the receiving interface of the communicating node. However, outward and return paths routed by conventional routing algorithms are generally the same. As a result, intermediate nodes have to switch their interface channel frequently and compete with other nodes to use receiver's channel. This leads to significant degradation in their throughput. Therefore, this paper proposes a disjoint path routing scheme in order to prevent the frequent interface switching and improve the throughput performance in the WMN. Simulations revealed that the proposed routing scheme can produce excellent performance compared with the conventional routing schemes.