Patent ID: 7978725

Claim:
A routing node operative in a wireless mesh network comprising a destination node, the routing node comprising: one or more wireless network interfaces; one or more processors; a memory; and a routing node application, physically stored in the memory, comprising instructions operable to cause the one or more processors and the routing node to implement a contention-based media access mechanism operative to coordinate transmission over a wireless medium of wireless packets with other routing nodes in a hierarchical wireless mesh network including a root node, wherein one or more contention parameters influence operation of the contention-based media access mechanism; receive one or more messages from at least one of the other routing nodes, wherein the one or more messages each indicate a number of hops from the respective routing node that transmitted the one or more messages to the root node; compute a routing metric for each of the other routing nodes from which messages were received, wherein the routing metric is a function of at least the number of hops identified in a respective message transmitted by a corresponding routing node; select a parent routing node from the other routing nodes, from which the one or more messages were received based on the routing metric; determine a hop count based on the number of hops indicated in the message received from the selected parent routing node, wherein the hop count is the number of hops from the routing node through the selected parent node to the root node in the hierarchical wireless mesh network; and adjust one or more contention parameters based at least in part on the hop count.