AMIRA: Interference-Aware Routing Using Ant Colony Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of packet routing for interference avoidance in infrastructure mesh networks. We propose AMIRA, an interference-aware routing protocol designed to improve load balancing by avoiding inter and intra flow interference in a typical mesh backbone network. AMIRA is based on the framework of ant colony optimization (ACO) which is a meta-heuristic approach for stochastically solving a problem together with our local heuristic technique to avoid interference within and among packet flows. In AMIRA, each node uses MAC level information to measure link qualities which helps in selecting reduced interference paths thus resulting in improved load balancing in addition to the auto load balancing feature of the ACO framework. Our simulation results demonstrate that under congestion, AMIRA gives increased throughput and low end-to-end delay when compared to other existing routing protocols because of its interference aware technique and stochastic data forwarding nature.