Hybrid Intelligent Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks: Soft Computing Based Approaches

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are the evolutionary self-organizing multi-hop wireless networks to promise last mile access. Due to the emergence of stochastically varying network environments, routing in WMNs is critically affected. In this paper, we first propose a fuzzy logic based hybrid performance metric comprising of link and node parameters. This Integrated Link Cost (ILC) is computed for each link based upon throughput, delay, jitter of the link and residual energy of the node and is used to compute shortest path between a given source-terminal node pair. Further to address the optimal routing path selection, two soft computing based approaches are proposed and analyzed along with a conventional approach. Extensive simulations are performed for various architectures of WMNs with varying network conditions. It was observed that the proposed approaches are far superior in dealing with dynamic nature of WMNs as compared to Adhoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) algorithm