Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Background: Wireless Mesh Networks is an emerging field and versatile network infrastructure constitutes the collaboration of heterogeneous mesh routers managed by different users to extend network coverage. The performance of WMNs depends on the designing of a routing protocol. While implementing the routing protocols, allocation of routing metrics are done to different paths for calculating best paths which represents a function for the prediction of the best routing path. Methods: To select best path in WMNs, tree based routing protocols and hop count based routing protocols are proposed earlier. However, Poor scalability and throughput, high overhead owing to control packet flooding are still exists as drawbacks. Moreover, factors namely high number of forwarding nodes and load balancing factor are not focused. A novel routing protocol based on A* path finding algorithm and hybrid BAT algorithm is proposed to solve these issues. There are three phases namely discovery, path selection and route maintenance. In path discovery, the shortest path between the gateway and other nodes is found using A* path finding algorithm where more than five routes have been discovered. In second phase, the best path is selected for data transmission by considering load balancing as an important factor using hybrid BAT algorithm based on path relinking algorithm. During the joining of new nodes or node failures or nodes that are moving continuously in route is maintained through the other two phases. Results: The results of the proposed algorithm is attaining a higher packet delivery ratio, lesser end to end delay and lesser routing overhead than the existing routing protocols such as PAWMNet, FKAWMNet, HBWMnet, and these were obtained from their simulation results. Conclusion: The performances of the proposed algorithm were compared with other existing algorithm using other standard performance metrics which gives best results. The results show that the proposed approach is efficient to determine the parameters which affect the network.
Keywords: A* Algorithm, Hybrid BAT Algorithm (HBA), Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks, Load Balancing Metrics, Multi-path Routing, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN)