© 2014, IJARCSMS All Rights Reserved 306 | P a g e ISSN: 232 7782 (Online) 1 Computer Science and Management Studies  International Journal of Advance Research in Volume 2, Issue 9, September 2014 Research Article / Survey Paper / Case Study Available online at: www.ijarcsms.com A Study on Link Quality, Load and Energy Aware Routing Metrics in Wireless Mesh Network V. Lakshmi Praba 1 Assistant Professor Rani Anna Govt. College for Women Tirunelveli – India A.Mercy Rani 2 Assistant Professor Sri.S.R.N.M College Sattur – India Abstract: Wireless Mesh Network is an emerging technology due to their advanced features like low deployment cost, last mile broadband connectivity and easy to installation. Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks is a hot research topic in recent years, with the goal to achieve high throughput and reliable routing over the network. Routing protocols play a vital role in routing. They are divided into three categories such as proactive(table-driven), reactive(on-demand) and hybrid. Proactive routing protocols compute routes between every node in the network irrespective of its usage whereas reactive protocols compute routes only when it is required for the transmission. Hybrid routing is a combination of proactive as well as reactive routing. Routing metric is a parameter used for selecting the best route between source and destination. The existing protocols use the hop count as the routing metric. However, the default hop count metric may generate congestion, node failure and link failure etc. Hence, many routing metrics have been proposed for wireless mesh networks by considering the quality or capacity of a link, load, transmission rate, bandwidth, distance, cost, energy etc. These proposed routing schemes provide high flexibility and reliability in the selection of best path between source and destination. In this paper, the proposed routing metrics which are created by considering the link quality, energy and load are discussed. Keywords: link quality, energy, ILA, CWB, PIM. I. INTRODUCTION The recent development in wireless communication technologies has encouraged a flourish of a new kind of multi-hop wireless network architecture, called Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Wireless Mesh Network is a communication network made up of radio nodes organized like a mesh topology. The architecture consists of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. The mesh clients are often stationery devices, laptops, mobile phones and other wireless devices. The mesh routers forward messages to and from the gateways and it also forwards the packets to remote nodes through another router located within a few hops. Gateway may connect to the Internet through a wired or wireless link. A mesh network is reliable and provides redundancy. When one node fails in the network, the rest of the nodes can communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes [1][2]. WMN possess the advanced features of robustness, wide area coverage, easy network deployment and maintenance, self-healing, self-configuring, low deployment cost and self-organizing etc. Due to these features, WMN is mainly used in Healthcare, Disaster recovery, Home Automation, Historical Monuments and Industries [3]. The WMN has the following important characteristics[4].  It supports ad-hoc networking and has the features of self-configuring, self-healing and self-organization.  WMN is a multi-hop wireless network; through mesh routers, it provides wireless infrastructure/backbone for mesh clients.  The mesh routers are static and it performs dedicated routing and configuration to reduce the load of mesh clients and other end nodes.  Mobility of mesh clients is supported easily through the wireless infrastructure.