Cross-Layer Metrics for Reliable Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a flexible and low-cost network infrastructure, where heterogeneous mesh routers managed by different users collaborate to extend network coverage. This paper proposes a novel routing metric, Expected Forwarded Counter (EFW), and two further variants, to cope with the problem of selfish behavior (i.e., packet dropping) of mesh routers in a WMN. EFW combines, in a cross-layer fashion, routing-layer observations of forwarding behavior with MAC-layer measurements of wireless link quality to select the most reliable and high-performance path. We evaluate the proposed metrics both through simulations and real-life deployments on two different wireless testbeds, performing a comparative analysis with On-Demand Secure Byzantine Resilient Routing (ODSBR) Protocol and Expected Transmission Counter (ETX). The results show that our cross-layer metrics accurately capture the path reliability and considerably increase the WMN performance, even when a high percentage of network nodes misbehave.