Power- and Node-Type-Aware Routing Algorithm for Emergency-Response Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) integrate fast deployable backbone networks and distributed mobile ad hoc networks with self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for emergency management communications. An incident area network needs reliable routing paths during disaster recovery and emergency response operations, when pre-existing communication infrastructure and power resources have been destroyed. Power-aware routing plays an essential role in this context to provide prolonged emergency services. Nevertheless, most of the previous power-aware routing algorithms did not fully exploit the characteristics of WMNs. This paper proposes a power- and WMN node-type-aware routing algorithm (PNTARA), which selects optimized routes based on a joint consideration of the nodes' types and power levels along the path. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the network performance by reducing the power consumption and network overheads, whilst maintaining high data delivery ratio with low end-to-end delay.