29 Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have attracted significant interests in recent years because of the flexibility and reduced costs. Routing protocols for WMNs is one of the most important factor and the prevalent research topics. According to the objectives of performance optimization, they can be divided into six categories: Hop-Count Based Routing, Link-Level QoS Routing, End-to-End QoS Routing, Reliability-Aware Routing, Stability-Aware Routing and Scalable Routing. This paper focuses on four kinds of the classification, giving the basic train of thought and example protocols. We will analyze the performance and compare their difference. A lot of work should be done to provide efficient routing protocols for the development of WMNs.