A hybrid routing method for multi-hop wireless local area networks

Abstract

A multi-hop wireless local area network (LAN) is an adhoc wireless network that connects to the Internet backbone via an access point. Routing paths between mobile hosts and a fixed host can be divided into two sub-paths, wireless and wired. In this paper, we apply the Hierarchical Routing Tree (HRT) concept to finding wireless sub-paths. That is, by constructing an HRT. each mobile host can find a routing path to an access point (i.e.. the HRT root) quickly and thus gain the access to Internet. In addition, we choose the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol as a point-to-point routing method for sources and destinations located in the same ad-hoc network in order to improve upon a weakness in the HRT method. Numerical experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the hybrid routing method.