Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have became the focus of many researchers as a promising technology for a broad range of applications due to their self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing capability, in addition to their low equipments and deployment cost. WMNs are not mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs); instead they can be considered as a superset of traditional mobile ad hoc networks (MANETS). WMNs may exist in the absence of a central infrastructure taking the form of a MANET. However on the other hand, they may exist as networks comprised of an infrastructure connecting extended ad hoc networks. One significant area of research within ad hoc networks is routing and in particular, the efficient thereof. Owing to the characteristics of WMNs, routing algorithms designed for ad hoc networks however may not always be applicable to WMNs. Moreover, traditional ad hoc routing protocols which disseminate routing information by flooding, a technique which requires a significant consumption of energy and bandwidth, cannot achieve optimal performance especially in hybrid WMNs. In this paper, we use a technique to reduce the cost of disseminating information in a power-constrained environment by limiting the cardinality of the subset of nodes which retransmit a packet. This technique can improve the performance of AODV in hybrid mesh networks.

Key words: Wireless mesh networks, multi-radio, routing, hybrid mesh networks, limited forwarding, AODV