Routing protocol metrics for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) play an important role in today communication and they could take more portion of wireless communication in near future. WMN‘s research area challenges on some problems such as low throughput and high delays. Routing Protocols in WMNs have a vital role in data communication and the main key in all routing protocols is metric. In this paper, most of the metrics in WMNs are considered in different categories. Link-quality and Load-dependant metrics are covered most of the metrics and then later metrics for multi channels networks are considered. Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as a famous link-quality metric with all its divisions have been studied and then more metrics which consider more wireless parameters such as intra and inter interferences have been added. In the last sections, some metrics which provide for multi channel networks and multi interface devices are mentioned and also metric for cognitive radio environment. In the end of the paper, conclusion with a comparison table has been provided to compare metrics in WMNs.