Summary: More than providing a wireless structure for Internet access, Wireless Mesh Networks are being challenged to support diverse kinds of multimedia applications such as Voice over IP and video streaming in publish-subscriber and peer-to-peer service models. In this context, several routing metrics have been proposed to improve the routing performance as well as the network capability to satisfy the requirements of multimedia applications. However, most routing metrics lack the consistent integration of efficient monitoring mechanisms for interference and traffic load characterization in order to support the adequate decisions by the routing algorithms. In this sense, a new routing metric is proposed in this paper, called Metric for INterference and channel Diversity (MIND), that measures network interference and load, based on a passive monitoring mechanism in order to avoid the overhead of active network state information gathering. An evaluation of MIND and relevant existing routing metrics was performed using NS2. The results showed that when path selection is based on MIND, traffic performance is significantly better than with the other metrics.