Abstract: Based on studying the characteristics of topology and business model of wireless mesh networks, depth analysis of the suitable routing protocol type for WMN was given out which shows that proactive hop-by-hop routing is most suitable for WMN. On the basis of Optimized Link State Routing which is a typical proactive hop-by-hop routing protocola MPR election frequency based routing protocol called EOLSR was proposed for Wireless Mesh Networks. EOLSR takes in the new concept of "MPR election frequency" and overcomes the defect of inadequate resource utilization of OLSR in Wireless Mesh Network environment by expanding the neighbor table structure and improving the MPR seleclion algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed EOLSR protocol improves the network throughput and reduces the end-to-end delay without increasing the routing overhead.

Key words: Wireless mesh network, Routing protocol, Multipoint relaying