Cluster Based Hybrid Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerged as prominent solution to provide seamless connection to the internet. WMNs are typically used for providing broadband wireless internet access to a large number of users and networks. Guaranteeing the quality of service to end users with efficient resource utilization is a challenging issue in WMNs. To accomplish this, we propose a hybrid routing protocol for wireless mesh networks. It is a combination of intra cluster routing protocol (ICR) and inter cluster routing protocol for mesh networks (ICMR). Intra cluster routing protocol is intended to facilitate the communication between mesh clients within a same cluster and inter cluster routing protocol (ICMR) intended to facilitate the communication for mesh clients from different clusters. Intra cluster routing protocol is a proactive type of routing protocol and inter cluster routing protocol is a reactive type of routing protocol. The performance of the proposed protocol is analyzed and the results shown superior performance compared to baseline routing protocols in terms of throughput, end to end delay, packet delivery ratio and jitter.