Wireless Personal Communications

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-022-09846-0

Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint

Path Discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks

C. S. Anita1 · R. Sasikumar1

Accepted: 28 May 2022

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022

Abstract
With the ease of appending new nodes without re-installing the whole network, the Internet
of Things (IoT) builds several smart applications on Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). One
of the important aspects of integrating WMN and smart IoT applications is to provide an
energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol. Seeking the communication route that deliv-
ers the high-quality stream quickly over WMN is an important issue, but the maximum
utilization of a single high-quality path leads to poor throughput and large communication
delay, including route discovery and data forwarding delay. The broadcasting mechanism
creates redundant transmissions of control packets into the network and reinitializes the
blind route discovery process due to link disconnections leading to network resource con-
straints and high delay during the route discovery process. Moreover, the congestion in the
communication route incurs data transmission latency. This paper proposes the Multiple
Disjoint Path Determination (MDPD) mechanism based on-demand routing in WMN to
formulate the path discovery and data transmission latency. Reducing the neighbor list into
the uncommon neighbor set reduces the unnecessary latency in route discovery, and deriv-
ing high capacity multiple disjoint communication routes reduce the communication delay
in the proposed work. The proposed work employs the queue dynamics in queuing delay,
which mainly provides adaptability to the dynamics in network capacity and efficient diver-
sity paths to the gateway node to infer the available bandwidth and optimize the network
traffic. To fully utilize the advantage of heterogeneous routers, it disables the flooding of
control packets across the stable mesh routers, excluding the initial route discovery pro-
cess, because it enables the available route storage system in each mesh router. Hence, the
proposed work efficiently supports wireless broadband internet access with reduced delay
and control overhead. The simulation results demonstrate the fast detection of the multiple
disjoint routes and data traffic optimization over the discovered disjoint routes in the pro-
posed MDPD mechanism over WMN.

Keywords Wireless mesh networks (WMN) · Communication Delay · Multi-path routing ·

Interference · Uncommon neighbor Set

* C. S. Anita
[email protected]
1
CSE, R.M.D. Engineering College, Kavaraipettai, Tamil Nadu, India

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1 Introduction

A self-organized and self-configured Wireless Mesh Network, WMN consists of wireless

mesh routers and mobile clients, where the mobile clients dynamically form the ad-hoc
network and maintain the wireless mesh connectivity among them [1, 2]. The WMN is
great for applying in IoT-based smart applications, where the clients always need to remain
online [3, 4]. The WMN enforces a new router to maintain the connection alive if one
router loses its wireless connectivity. Thus, the WMN becomes more viable for industrial
and commercial IoT applications. There are several benefits of using WMN for IoT solu-
tions since the Mesh-enabled nodes can capture live data and provide smart applications.
IoT aware WMN has gained significant attention recently in supporting the routing as it
generates a large volume of data that significantly impacts the routing operations in WMN.
A cluster-based routing is proposed that supports load balancing and interference to over-
come the networking-related issues [5]. In WMN, the wireless mesh routers with gateway/
bridge function can integrate with various wireless networks such as WiFi and cellular net-
works. The mesh clients can connect to the internet or external network by forwarding the
data packets to the gateway node. Key features of a WMN are flexibility and self-organ-
izing capability. Building multihop routes for wireless communication in smart applica-
tions based on mesh topology requires an energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol.
However, the traffic transmitted from the mobile clients to the gateways incurs overload on
certain links. Thereby the routing performance is degraded in smart applications. Thus, it
is necessary to introduce the modified routing strategy into the routing process over WMN.
According to the routing strategy, the existing routing protocols are divided into table-
driven and source-initiated routing protocols. The table-driven routing protocols need to
determine the routes constantly, and the routes are stored in the routing tables. However,
in on-demand routing protocols, the source node initiates the route discovery process when
necessary. Thus, the on-demand routing protocols utilize less bandwidth and incur less
overhead than the table-driven routing protocols. Each time, the source node initiates the
flooding of Route Request (RREQ) packets to discover the communication routes into the
network. The path discovery latency is an important factor in WMN, where the data pack-
ets need to deliver quickly. It is necessary to control the unnecessary RREQ flooding to
reduce the route discovery latency and utilize the complete network capacity to increase
the communication speed.
The multi-path routing, which uses multiple diversity paths for data forwarding con-
currently, is the best solution for improving communication efficiency and reducing the
communication delay in WMN. The multi-path routing technique offer advantages such as
resource maintenance, load balancing, bandwidth allocation, and fault tolerance [6, 7] over
single path routing. Concurrent multi-path routing to the intended gateway through dis-
joint wireless routers reduces the impact of a link failure on communication. When a link
is over-utilized, the alternative path diverts the traffic to ease the burden of the congested
links. It effectively aggregates the bandwidth by allocating the data traffic through multiple
paths to the same gateway. Moreover, it reduces the data delay in multi-path routing, as the
alternative disjoint routes are identified to deliver the data packets quickly. In this work, the
uncommon neighbor list knowledge and bandwidth-aware data transmission reduce route
discovery latency and improve communication efficiency. To support the hybrid WMN,
the proposed work makes the mesh routers silent without forwarding the RREQ packets,
excluding the first route discovery process, because each stable mesh router retains the
available routes to the gateway node always.

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1.1 Aim and Objectives

The main aim and objectives of the paper are as follows:

• A primary aim of the proposed work is to improve the routing capabilities of WMNs
for supporting several smart IoT applications.
• The main aim of the proposed work is to reduce the redundant transmission of
RREQ packets across the network using the uncommon neighbor set that reduces the
route discovery latency
• To avoid the re-initialization of the route discovery process among stable mesh rout-
ers due to the link disconnections between the mesh clients enables the route storage
system in each mesh router during the first route discovery
• To provide a guarantee that the protocol never misses the best routes without incur-
ring a large delay, include extra time in RTT after receiving the first RREP packet
• To support the full utilization of channel capacity without incurring the congestion
and unnecessary packet loss in the queue implements bandwidth aware traffic alloca-
tion among multiple disjoint routes
• To evaluate the performance of the proposed work using Network Simulator 2 (NS2)

1.2 Problem Statement

In wireless communication, a major problem in the existing routing protocols is the

communication latency, including route discovery latency due to blind broadcasting and
data transmission latency due to the congestion in the communication route. In the case
of a blind broadcasting mechanism, the routing overhead increases with respect to the
network size. Often the link disconnection incurs data interruption, thereby reinitiating
the route discovery process for establishing the new routes. The redundant re-broadcast-
ing of control packets increases the collision in the physical layer as the data and control
packets share the same medium in the network. The reinitialized route discovery process
increases the discovery delay due to the frequent link disconnections and high medium
access. Existing techniques implement random channel or slot selection for exchang-
ing the control packets to avoid the broadcast collision in the MAC layer. However, it
does not resolve the hidden terminal problem. It is necessary to propose the multi-path
disjoint routes between the source and gateway. The congestion of one link influences
other routes resulting in lower routing performance than expected. Thus, discovering
independent routes in WMN needs to guarantee the routes with interference-edge dis-
jointness and tolerable communication delay, including route discovery delay and data
transmission delay.

1.3 Paper Organization

The paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 discusses the previous works related to the
multi-path routing and broadcasting mechanism in the WMN environment. The pro-
posed MDPD routing scheme is discussed in Sect. 3. Section 4 shows the experimental
results of the proposed MDPD mechanism, and Sect. 5 concludes the work.

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

2 Related Works

The recent advances in wireless mesh networks may impose different requirements
on the design of routing protocols. Thus, it is important to know which routing pro-
tocol performance is better for mesh networks. In existing, many routing protocols are
designed for the WMN, such as cross-layer based joint routing and rate adaptation proto-
col [8], trustworthy and energy-aware routing protocols based on software-defined wire-
less mesh networks [9], flow interference mitigation routing [10] are applied to various
WMN environments. However, multi-path routing is preferred due to the potential ben-
efits. The following section provides a detailed review of multi-path routing protocols.

2.1 Multi‑path Routing Protocols

In order to address and support the occurrence of stable mesh routers in mesh networks,
need different approaches used in the MANET. The multi-path routing is preferable
since new routes under a large-scale network cannot be discovered quickly. Several
multi-path routing protocols [11] have been proposed for discovering multiple commu-
nication routes between the source and gateway in MANET. In these protocols, a source
node uses a single path for routing the data packets, and other routes that are already
discovered between the source and gateway are used as the backup routes. The backup
routes or the alternative paths are used only when the main route is failed. In case of a
link failure on the main route, the source node switches the data transmission to alterna-
tive routes to the gateway instead of rediscovers the communication routes. Moreover,
when all the discovered routes are disconnected, reinitialize the route discovery process.
However, it is not sufficient for WMN due to a stable backbone system. The reinforce-
ment learning technique is used for energy-sensitive mesh networks [12]. The reinforce-
ment learning technique populates and updates the routing table constantly to find a bet-
ter route. It increases power efficiency, failure rate, and spectrum efficiency. However,
with the increase in network scalability, the routing algorithm without learning capabili-
ties becomes more significant.
Several works implement a multi-path routing method for improving the performance of
mesh networks. However, without selecting the proper routing metrics, there is no use with
multiple routing paths. Some routing works use a single aggregated value to determine a
set of feasible paths [13, 14]. Although they reduce the route selection delay, this might not
meet the constraints of important metrics and the requirement of high traffic networks, so
a single aggregated value may not guarantee the reliable communication. In [6], the mul-
tiple discovered routes are used for the packet routing concurrently. In such a case, a node
selects and forwards the packets through multiple paths for the same gateway. It increases
network throughput and alleviates the problem of link disconnections among mobile cli-
ents. The number of multiple path routing is comparatively evaluated in [15] for various
network parameters. The main advantage of these protocols is their distributed on-demand
nature routing, but a more reliable solution is essential for multi-path routing in WMN.
A local repair-based multi-constrained routing protocol is proposed in [16] for WMNs. It
provides a fast and cost-efficient route recovery, especially when the QoS is degraded on
the routing path. It exploits the congestion threshold for each link based on its link quality,
end-to-end path quality, and multiple constraints. Even though, to satisfy the end-to-end
reliability, the multi-path routing technique needs to reduce the end-to-end route discovery

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latency and link capacity measurement before selecting the communication paths for data
forwarding.

2.2 Broadcasting Mechanisms

The important mechanism for the route discovery process is broadcasting. However, the
broadcasting mechanisms of MANET incur unnecessary delay and resource utilization in
the MANET environment [17, 18]. Moreover, the mesh routers have multiple radio inter-
faces with multiple orthogonal channels. Utilizing the feature of multi-channel is important
to improve the performance of routing over mesh networks [19]. The packet redundancy in
broadcasting leads to high resource consumption, contentions, and collisions. In [20], the
gossip-based algorithm is used in which the packets are forwarded based on the probability
model. Thus, the optimized route discovery algorithms [21, 22] reduce the routing over-
head more than the blind broadcasting mechanism. The performance of the gossip-based
approach is limited when the network density or traffic is high [20]. The coverage area and
neighbor-based probabilistic broadcasting are proposed in [17]. The neighbor confirma-
tion scheme ensures the router reachability, and the re-broadcast probability is set based on
the neighbor coverage area. The neighbor knowledge-based Scalable Broadcast Algorithm
(SBA) determines whether the packet reaches additional nodes. However, it is difficult
to determine the multiple disjoint routes between the source and gateway with optimized
broadcasting [23]. For WMN, it is necessary to optimize the broadcasting technique and
determine multiple disjoint routes between the source and gateway node without incurring
high routing overhead and delay.

3 Network Model

In the network G, all the nodes have the same transmission range R. Each node is denoted
as N with a unique ID, and it belongs to G. Let η(N) denotes a set of neighbor nodes of
N. It means the nodes ∈ η(N) are within the transmission range of N, and it receives the
packets transmitted by N. A node N should know the information of its direct neighbors,

Fig. 1  Architecture for the mesh network in smart applications

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Table 1  Notations Used Notation Description

G Network
N Nodes
H Network Height
W Network Width
η 1-hop neighbors
R Communication range
C(A) Coverage area
Fw Forwarding nodes
d() Distance
NHmax Max numbers of hops between source and destination
υ Packet speed
N’ Number of nodes that access the medium
Ti Time interval
β Time taken to initialize the RREP
η’ Uncommon neighbor set
max ­Hl (η’) Maximum hop length of a node in η’
Tb RTT period boosting time
Drt Disjoint root
Li Number of Links
Bi Link capacity
Ts Number of successive transmissions
M_busy MAC busy
(M_idle) MAC idle
τ Queue_packet waiting period
C and α Constant value

including their identities. The following Fig. 1 shows the wireless communication in a
mesh topology.
The following Table 1 lists the notations used in the proposed work.
Every node ∈ G obtains its 1-hop η(s) neighbor information using the HELLO mes-
sage broadcasting by each node. Likewise, every sender node broadcasts RRRQ packets to
identify a better route to the destination. Instead of blindly broadcasting the RREQ packets
into the network, the proposed methodology attempts to reduce the number of forwarding
nodes without shrinking the coverage area of a sending node s. If a node η1(s) receives
a flooding message for the first time and η1(s) satisfies the forwarding condition,η1(s) is
designated as a forwarding node. The necessity of control message forwarding is decided
based on the uncommon neighbor list. In other words, in identifying the forwarding nodes,
Fw from the neighbor list should satisfy the condition: Coverage area of node s, C(A)s
must be covered by the entire forwarding nodes ∈η(s). The C(A)s by the η(s) can be for-
mally defined as follows.
|𝜂(s)|
∪ d(i) = ∪ d(s) (1)
i=1 s∈G

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For example, a node s has three neighbors, such as η(s) = {u, v, and w}. They make up
the neighbor’s area of s, and so a restricted forwarding list from 1-hop neighbors should be
enough to cover all of s’s 2-hop neighbors if only the forwarding nodes are involved in the
RREQ broadcasting. In other words,
|Fw(s)| |(s)|
∪ d(f) = ∪ d(i) (2)
f=1 i=1

There is no need for nodes ∈ Fw to broadcast the RREQ message. The following sec-
tions describe the issues in RREQ broadcasting latency and also the determination of Fw
from the neighbors.

3.1 Problem Formulation

The main problem associated with the on-demand routing protocol is communication
latency. Generally, many metrics related to the on-demand route discovery latency, such as
network traffic rate, node mobility, and average one-hop neighbor distance of the network
and control packet processing time at intermediate nodes, contribute to route discovery
latency [21]. The blind broadcasting mechanism mainly incurs the latency of route discov-
ery. In an on-demand route discovery process, a source node broadcasts the RREQ packet
in the network. Initially, a source node broadcasts the RREQ packet to the one-hop neigh-
boring nodes. The neighboring nodes re-broadcast the packet, including its id, to one-hop
neighboring nodes. If it has seen the same packet already, the RREQ is considered a dupli-
cate and discarded. If the intermediate nodes have a fresh route to the gateway, it sends the
Route Reply (RREP) packet to the source node via the same route. Otherwise, the packet is
broadcasted towards the gateway until the packet’s living time has expired and establishes
the routes to the gateway.
A source node estimates the route discovery time, ­Tdiscovery, when it broadcasts the
RREQ packets. It represents that the source node takes ­Tdiscovery time to discover the multi-
ple disjoint routes to the gateway. This ­Tdiscovery is the total route discovery latency, includ-
ing broadcasting time, waiting period, and replying time. The given formula can express
the route discovery latency,
{ } { } { }
Tdiscovery = Tbroadcasting + Twaiting network traffic + Treply (3)

Tbroadcasting is defined as the total traveling time of the RREQ packet in the network. As
each node broadcasts the RREQ packet to all of its neighbors, it determines the time to
traverse the average hop length of the network and the maximum number of hops between
the source and gateway (­NHmax). In the worst case, consider that the source and gateway
are placed on two different network edges. By default, the distance between the source and
gateway as network width means the nodes are placed on two different edges.
( )
R
Tbroadcasting = NHmax ∗ (4)
𝜈
where R is a communication range of a node, and it is used to represent a maximum hop
length of a one-hop neighbor, υ represents the packet speed, and η represents the number
of one-hop neighbors in the communication range R. N ­ Hmax is estimated based on the net-
work Height (H) and Width (W).

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

NHmax = W∕R (5)

𝜂 = (N∕(H*W)) * R2 (6)
Moreover, the ­Twaiting is based on the network traffic rate, which denotes the number of
source and gateway pairs in a particular interval or how many nodes access the medium
(N’) within a particular time interval (Ti). If other nodes access the medium at a particular
interval, a new node waits almost ‘β’ time for sending the RREP packet back to the source
node, as it is a unicast routing.
(( �/ ) )
Twaiting =∗ N N ∗ (7)
Ti

where ­NHmax represents the distance between two nodes placed on two different edges.
Moreover, if the value of ­NHmax is high, the ­Tbroadcasting is also increased, and it also
increases the ­Twaiting period for the intermediate nodes in the waiting state. The time of
­Twaiting is also increased, resulting in high route discovery latency due to the blind broad-
casting technique. In Eq. (3), ­Treply denotes the time taken by the gateway to reply to the
sender node through all available paths. It is slightly more or less to the ­Tbroadcasting, as
shown in Eq. (4). By substituting the Eqs. (4) and (7) in (3), the total delay for route dis-
covery ­Tdiscovery is estimated as follows,
( ) (( �/ ) )
R
Tdiscovery = 2 ∗ NHmax ∗ +∗ N N ∗ (8)
𝜈 Ti

Thus, instead of using the blind technique in the route discovery, in the proposed work,
the MDPD mechanism employs uncommon neighbor set-based restricted broadcasting that
significantly reduces route discovery latency.

3.2 Multiple Disjoint Routes Discovery (MDPD) Based On‑Demand Routing

Disjoint ness is an important factor for discovering multiple routes to the gateway node,
but the duplicate Route Request packet (RREQ) reception induces unnecessary transmis-
sions, resulting in high routing overhead. Duplicate packets and retransmissions due to the
mobility of nodes may exacerbate congestion in the network. Multiple disjoint routes are
employed for data transmission to reduce the impact of unnecessary delay and congestion
on the protocol performance. However, the time consumption for discovering multiple dis-
joint paths to the gateway node is quite large. The proposed system employs the uncommon
neighbor set to limit the RREQ broadcasting. Moreover, it includes the end-to-end capacity
estimation for traffic allocation among multiple disjoint routes. Thus, the proposed system
reduces the determination time of disjoint paths to the gateway. The following Fig. 2 shows
the block diagram of the proposed methodology.

3.2.1 MDPD Mechanism

The proposed MDPD-based on-demand routing comprises two phases such as route dis-
covery based on uncommon neighbor set and route maintenance and data forwarding
[17]. The routing paths which have high capacity are selected for the data transmis-
sion. In the route discovery phase, each node estimates the uncommon neighbor set and

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Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint Path…

Sender Node Destination Node

Multiple Disjoint Route Data Forwarding

Discovery Process

Collecting All Available Reverse

Hello Message Transmission for Paths to the Source Node
Neighbor List Identification

Common Neighbor List Route Maintenance

Determination

Bandwidth Estimation for Best

Determining Forwarding Nodes Path Selection and RREP
Transmission

Duplicate Packet Reduction using Reliable and Fast Data

Restricted RREQ Broadcasting Transmission

Fig. 2  Block diagram of the proposed methodology

broadcasts the RREQ packet only to the neighbors in an uncommon neighbor set. RREQ
includes a hop count as one of its fields. Each node increments the hop count in RREQ
when it receives. The gateway node replies to the source node with the RREP packet
through the reverse path of the received RREQ packet. Each node that receives the
RREP packet measures the link capacity in available bandwidth. A node may receive
more number of RREP packets from different disjoint routes. If a node receives one or
more RREP packets from the gateway, it selects the RREP packet with high capacity
and allows it to traverse towards the source node, and it stores the remaining routes in
the route list. Thus, the proposed MDPD mechanism reduces the re-broadcast delay in
the route discovery phase.
The proposed MDPD-based on-demand routing discovers multiple routing paths
using fewer control messages. Instead of using a blind technique for broadcasting the
RREQ packets to neighboring nodes in the communication range, the proposed work
focuses on neighbor knowledge-based broadcasting. To reduce the re-broadcast latency
or duplicate transmissions, exploit the restricted broadcast technique, including neigh-
bor coverage knowledge. It avoids duplicate packet transmission and joint path usage in
multi-path routing. Thus, a node that receives the RREQ packet needs to broadcast the
RREQ packet only to the uncommon neighboring nodes.

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

The need to estimate the uncommon neighbor set is shown in Eq. (9). A source node
appends its neighbor list in the RREQ packets before initiating the discovery process. A
node that receives the RREQ packet estimates its uncommon neighbors with the sender
node using the neighbor information included in the RREQ packet and broadcasts it if only
the uncommon neighbors are high. In addition, a node discards the packet if it has seen the
packet already and adjusts the uncommon neighbor set η’.
{ [ ] }
𝜂i� = 𝜂i − 𝜂i ∩ 𝜂s − S (9)

where ηi and ηs represent the neighbors of node i, and S and η’i represents the uncom-
mon neighbor list of node i with node S. To sufficiently reduce the route discovery latency
exploits the neighbor coverage knowledge. The main aim of the neighbor coverage knowl-
edge utilization is not only to avoid the duplicate packets but to distribute the RREQ packet
more quickly in the network. Suppose the intermediate nodes have the largest number of
uncommon neighbors with the node according to the Eq. (9), the ­Tbroadcastingis high. If it has
less number of common neighbors, T ­ broadcasting and ­Twaiting are small.

3.2.2 MDPD Initial Route Discovery Latency

In the proposed system, each node has 11 channels and four different physical layers as it
implements IEEE 802.11 g standards in the Multi-Channel MAC layer in which a common
channel is assigned as a control channel. In the control channel, the value of T ­ discovery is
estimated based on the estimated max H ­ l (η’) value. Thus, the Eq. (4) is rewritten as,
� � ��
⎛ max Hl 𝜂 𝜈 ⎞
Tbroadcasting = ⎜NHmax ∗ ⎟ (10)
⎜ 𝜈 ⎟
⎝ ⎠

where max H ­ l (η’) denotes the maximum hop length of a node in η’, instead of taking
the node’s communication range, because there is a possibility for H ­ l (η’) << R. Due
to the reduction of duplicate packet transmission in the route discovery process, the
­Tbroadcastingperiod is reduced [24]. Thus, the value of total delays, such as ­Tdiscoveryis reduced
significantly based on the restricted broadcasting mechanism in the proposed system.

3.3 Route Maintenance

In the route discovery process, the sender node floods the RREQ packets in the network.
Each node that receives the RREQ packet is responsible for re-broadcast the packet to the
uncommon neighbor set unless it is the gateway. In response to an uncommon neighbor set-
based route discovery, a gateway may learn or receive more RREQ packets from multiple
disjoint routes. The gateway replies to all the RREQ packets with the RREP packets, but
the RREQ packets should be received within the TTL period, equal to the ­Tbroadcasting.
The gateway node measures the modified TTL ­(TTLm) when it receives the first
RREQ packets based on the hop count included in the received packet. The RREQ pack-
ets with the T­ TLm expired are discarded. Otherwise, it replies with the RREP packet,
including ­TTLm. From the gateway, the RREP packets are routed back to the source
node via the reverse path of the RREQ packet. Each router in the path calculates the
RTT period based on ­TTLm for receiving further RREP packets after receiving the first
RREP packet. In each path, each node retains the path for the received RREP packets

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Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint Path…

within the estimated RTT period. Moreover, it measures the capacity for all the received
RREP packets. The packet with high capacity is allowed to travel back to the source
node. The alternative routes are maintained and used for data forwarding when the main
route fails. This mechanism responds to the unpredictable neighbor changes to be much
quicker.
In the proposed work, a gateway node sets the ­TTLm value for receiving RREQ pack-
ets. Each RREP receiver estimates the RTT based on the ­TTLm for receiving further
RREP packets. In Eq. (11), the ­TTLm value of received RREQ packets is determined.
Where H represents the hop count of the first received RREQ packet, and c represents
the constant value.
TTLm = H + R + c (11)
Each node determines the RTT based on the used ­TTLm, shown in Eq. (12).
( )
RTT = 2*TTLm + Tb (12)

The source node waits for an RTT period to collect all possible communication path
information to the gateway. Where T ­ b denotes, the time is designed to boost the RTT
period if an RREP is on the way to the source node. Moreover, a node, after receiving
the first RREP packet, estimates the RTT using T ­ TLm. For a specific network topology,
­Tb is constant. Therefore, the RTT period is only adapted to the used ­TTLm value. For
example, consider the disjoint path such as A-B-K-M in Fig. 3. A node k receives RREP
packets from two different disjoint paths within the estimated RTT value. These routing
paths are K-M and K-L-M. It retains the available routes to the reachable gateway node
M. It allows the highest capacity RREP packet, such as K-M, to travel through its path
to improve system performance. A sender node initiates the data forwarding based on
its estimated capacity through the discovered routes when the RTT of the first received
RREP packet has expired.

“M, K, B, A” B “M, K, B”
“M, K”
“D, A K
N, “D, N, J, I, F, C, A” “M, L, K”
J, M
B, “D, N, J, I, F, C” F “D, L, K”
E, L
C, C “D, N, J, I, F” Other
A” “D, L” n/w or
“D, “D, R, I” “D, R” Internet
N, I R D
S,
G, “D, N, S, G, H, E” “D, N, J, I” “D, N”
H, E
“D, N, J” “P, N”
H J J
E,
C” “D, P, S, G, H”
P
S
G “P, S”
“D, P, S, G”

Fig. 3  MDPD route maintenance

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

3.4 Available Bandwidth Estimation

Consider, each disjoint route, ­Drt to the gateway includes Li number of links (i = 1, 2, 3,
4….n). The residual path bandwidth of a complete disjoint path, denoted by D ­ rt(B), is the
minimum link residual bandwidth of all links, Li on ­Drt. The mobile clients’ link capacity
estimation scheme relies on the information available at the MAC layer. The MAC layer
properties such as MAC busy (M_busy), MAC idle (M_idle) period, Queue_packet waiting
(τ) period, and the number of successive transmissions ­(Ts) within an interval d are used to
measure the link capacity ­(Bi). In Eq. (13), α is a constant value. From Eq. (14), the mini-
mum value of Li is set as the path residual bandwidth D ­ rt(B).
{ [( )/ ] }
Bi = 𝛼 ∗ Ts ∗ Midle (M ) − (1 − 𝛼) ∗ (q∕ )
busy ∗ d d (13)

Drt (B) = min (Li) where, i = 1, 2, 3, ...., n (14)

A sender node initiates the data transmission when it receives the RREP packets with
high path residual capacity. The traffic of the sending node is allocated based on the esti-
mated bandwidth value. Thus, it utilizes the channel capacity efficiently without incurring
congestion in the network. The algorithm of the proposed methodology is as follows.

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3.5 MDPD Adaptive to Heterogeneous Routers

The WMN is a particular type of MANET, and it shares the characteristics of multihop
communication, scalability, and mobility-related issues as MANETs. Hence, the MANET
routing protocols are suitable for WMN, but in which unnecessary latency and resource
utilization is incurred due to the presence of heterogeneous nodes such as mobile clients
and mesh routers or stable routers. Thus, there are significant changes in the performance
of MANET’s routing protocols in WMN. The proposed MDPD mechanism is suitable for
both the MANET and WMN, reducing the unwanted delay and resource utilization in the
WMN.
Initially, the MDPD mechanism incurs the same delay in WMN as MANET because no
route is established among the mesh routers. If the route discovery process is initialized,
the mesh routers retain multiple fresh routes to the reachable gateway routers, connecting

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

“A, B B “A, B, K”
M, K”
A K
“A, C”
“A, C” “M, L, K”
“A, C, F” F
L
C
Other
“A, C, F, I” “M, L” n/w or
“A, “A, C, F, I, R” “M, R” M Internet
I R
C,
E” “A, C, F, I, J”
“A, C, E, H” “M,N”
E
H J
“M, N,J” N
“A, C, E, H, G”
S
Mesh Routers G “M, S”
“A, C, E, H, G, S”
Gateway Nodes
Wireless Clients Network Wireless Mesh Backbone

Fig. 4  MDPD in WSNs

other networks or the internet. The rediscovery of routes to the gateway from the mesh
routers is unnecessary because the topology changes due to the mobility of mesh routers
being very less. However, route rediscovery is necessary for mobile clients to determine
the routes to the mesh routers because the mobile clients induce high link disconnections
due to their mobility. To design a routing protocol to adopt these different characteristics
with reduced control overhead includes the disjoint sub-paths maintenance scheme in the
proposed system. If a node initiates the route discovery process to the gateway node, the
RREQ packets are broadcast to the uncommon neighbor set until it reaches a mesh router
with the discovered route to the gateway. Thus, it avoids unnecessary delay, routing over-
head, and resource utilization in the network. The RREQ re-broadcast and reply delay are
reduced due to the maintenance of established routes to the gateway node from the wireless
mesh routers, and a limited ­TTLm period is shown in Eq. (17).
{ ( ( )) ( ( � )/ )}
Tre−broadcast = 𝛼 ∗ H − Dmb∕H ∗ max Hl 𝜂 𝜈 (15)
l

{[ ( )] ( )}
Treply = Nr (H) − Dmb∕H ∗ Hl∕𝜈 (16)
l

{( ( )) (( ) ( ))}
TTLm = H − Dmb∕H ∗ α ∗ 𝜂 � + Hl∕𝜈 (17)
l

where ­Dmb represents the Diameter of the Mesh Backbone. There is no need to take the
wireless mesh backbone area for determining the route to reach the high capacity gateway
node because the mesh routers retain the available disjoint routes to the gateway node in
its route list. When an RREQ packet reaches the wireless mesh backbone, the high capac-
ity routes to the gateway node are attached to the RREP packet and sent back to the source
node.
For example, the final design of the MDPD process in WSNs is shown in Fig. 4. When
a sender node A initiates the route discovery process, the RREQ packets are broadcasted
until it reaches the first mesh router in the mesh backbone since the mesh routers retain the
available routes to all reachable gateway nodes. Thus, the mesh router attaches the feasible
route information to reach the gateway in the RREP packet and sends it back to the sender

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Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint Path…

Fig. 5  Route discovery latency versus path length

node. The route failure is intimated by the Route Error (RERR) packet. Thus, the node
which maintains the route removes the failed route from the list. Moreover, a mesh router
that has a route to the gateway node determines the ­TTLm value based on the area of wire-
less mobile clients’ network, but not considering the wireless mesh backbone area. The
actual waiting time of a source node for receiving the high-capacity RREP packets from
the gateway node before initiating the data transmission is RTT [22]. The restriction of
RTT value based on the proposed work reduces the unnecessary delay of data transmission
initiation in WMN successfully.

4 Performance Evaluation

4.1 Simulation Model

NS-2-based simulation is conducted to show the performance of the proposed MDPD

based on-demand routing protocol over the wireless mesh network. The simulation is
performed with different densities of nodes. The simulation model consists of randomly
deployed 100/200/300 nodes, and these are randomly placed within the 1000 × 1000 ­m2
area. The moving velocity of the node is 25 m per sec, and it pauses for 0- 40 s. The com-
munication range of a node is 100 m. The network is simulated for 900 s. This simula-
tion study focuses on routing parameters such as communication latency, throughput, and

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

Fig. 6  Throughput versus node disjointness

normalized overhead to analyze the performance of the proposed MDPD based on-demand
routing protocol with the MP-DSR [15] routing protocol in mesh networks.

4.2 Simulation Results

4.2.1 Route Discovery Latency

Route Discovery latency is defined as the time taken by a node to determine the shortest
route in terms of a hop count to the gateway from the source node using control packets,
and it is shown in Fig. 5. It describes the path length impact on the route discovery latency.
The main reason behind the route discovery latency is the frequent blind broadcasting of
the route discovery process. Moreover, the route discovery latency is decreased with the
Node Density (ND) in the network. In existing protocols, the sender node initiates the
route discovery process without applying any limitations, which leads to duplicate packet
transmissions, and thus the route discovery latency is increased from 7.5 to 9 µs. However,
the proposed work initiates the neighbor knowledge-based route discovery process that
reduces the duplicate packet transmission during the route discovery process. Considering
the uncommon neighbor set for RREQ broadcasting, the proposed protocol significantly
reduces the route discovery latency range from 9 to 6 µs, even under a sparse network. The
estimation of TTL and RTT values based on the source position information can define the
maximum time to travel in the network, and thus, the network resource and time consump-
tion are low. Moreover, the maintenance of available alternative shortest routes reduces the
reinitialized route discovery delay due to the link disconnections. Thus, the proposed work
reduces the 13% route discovery delay induced in the existing MP DSR protocol.

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Neighbor Coverage and Bandwidth Aware Multiple Disjoint Path…

Fig. 7  Normalized overhead versus common neighbor ratio

4.2.1.1 Throughput Throughput is defined as the number of bits successfully delivered to

the gateway per second. The throughput is shown in Fig. 6 describes that the throughput is
degraded when the node disjointness is decreased. The proposed work can infer the avail-
able bandwidth and optimize network traffic using queuing dynamics for queuing delay. It
provides adaptability to the dynamic bandwidth conditions and efficient diversity paths to
the gateway. The node disjointness is enhanced by eliminating a common neighbor set from
the neighbor list because it removes the duplicate packet reception during the route dis-
covery process. Thus, the proposed work improves the throughput with node disjointness.
However, network throughput is degraded from 29 to 16 Mbps when the numbers of source
and gateway pairs (SD) increase in the network because the node disjointness is less when
the number of source and gateway pairs is increased from 5 to 15. Supporting the hetero-
geneous nodes in the network through the restriction of RREQ broadcasting among mesh
routers except the initial route discovery process increases the throughput performance by
30% more than the existing protocol under a highly dynamic network topology.

4.2.1.2 Normalized Routing Overhead The normalized routing overhead is the ratio
between the number of control packets transmitted to the number of data packets received.
The normalized overhead is shown in Fig. 7, which describes that the normalized overhead
increases from 0.42 to 0.5 when the node common neighbor ratio and Pause Time (PT) are
decreased in the range of 10 to 0 s. Existing protocols employ blind broadcasting for the
route discovery process. Thus it increases the number of RREQ packets broadcasted in the
neighborhood. It increases the normalized routing overhead in the network, and it is var-
ied based on the network traffic. However, the MDPD-based on-demand routing protocol
reduces the number of RREQ broadcasted in the neighborhood by eliminating uncommon
neighbor sets. The control packets used for the route discovery process are less than the total
number of transmitted data packets in the network. However, it is increased slightly from

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

0.35 to 0.42 when a link disconnection rate is increased (10 to 0 PT) due to unpredictable
node mobility. Moreover, the maintenance of available alternative shortest routes reduces
the normalized routing overhead because there is no need to broadcast the RREQ packets
among the mesh routers in the backbone network, excluding the first route discovery process
in the network.

5 Conclusion

In this paper, a Multiple Disjoint Path Determination (MDPD) mechanism based on-
demand routing in WMN is proposed that formulates the path discovery latency. By
employing an uncommon neighbor set, it derives the high capacity of multiple disjoint
communication routes among source and gateway. The available bandwidth aggregation
and network traffic optimization using queuing dynamics in queuing delay eliminate the
routing issues. In other words, the unnecessary waiting delay due to duplicate packet trans-
mission is eliminated. Moreover, it is adaptable to the dynamic bandwidth conditions and
efficient diversity paths among source and gateway. The disabled flooding of control pack-
ets across the mobile routers and available route storage system enables each mesh router
to attain the benefit of heterogeneous nodes in wireless mesh networks. Thus, it reduces the
route discovery delay and improves network throughput. The performance of the proposed
MDPD algorithm is simulated using the NS2 simulator and analyzes the routing efficiency
over mesh networks. The simulation comparison reveals that the proposed MDPD algo-
rithm is more suitable for mesh networks than existing routing protocols.

Author Contributions All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data
collection and analysis were performed by Anita C.S. and Sasikumar R. The first draft of the manuscript
was written by Anita C.S. and Sasikumar R. Both authors prepared and approved the final manuscript.

Funding The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of
this manuscript.

Data Availability All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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institutional affiliations.

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 C. S. Anita, R. Sasikumar

C. S. Anita is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Sci-

ence and Engineering,R.M.D.Engineering College. She obtained her
B.E(CSE) from Karunya Institute of Technology, Bharathiyar Univer-
sity and M.E(CSE) from Sathyabama University. She received her
Ph.D (Wireless Mesh Networks) from Anna University, Chennai in
2018. She has been in the teaching profession for the past 20 years and
has handled both UG and PG programmes. Her areas of interest
include Computer Networks, Compiler Design, Operating Systems and
Computer Graphics. She has published 3 patents, 5 papers in Interna-
tional Journals and 9 papers in National/International Conferences.
She has attended many workshops and seminars related to her area of
interest.

R. Sasikumar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science

and Engineering, R.M.D. Engineering College, Kavaraipettai, Tamil
Nadu. He completed his B.E Computer Science and Engineering
Degree at Kongu Engineering College, Perunduari, Erode and M.E
Computer Science and Engineering Degree at Annamalai University,
Chidambaram. He obtained his Doctorate in the area of “Network
Security” and is awarded Ph.D Degree by Anna University Chennai.
He has been in the teaching profession for the past 21 years and has
handled both UG and PG programmes. He has attended many work-
shops related to his area of interest. He has published 31 papers in var-
ious highly cited International / National journals and conferences. He
has organized various seminars, Guest lectures and conference. He
acted as a Session Chair and Advisory Board Member in many Confer-
ences. His current research interests are in the areas of Wireless Net-
works and Cloud Computing. He is a life member of various profes-
sional societies IAENG, CSTA, IACSIT and SIAM.

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