Comparison of routing metrics for static multi-hop wireless networks

By Richard Draves, J. Padhye, Brian Zill. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2004

1,032 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have traditionally focused on finding paths with minimum hop count. However, such paths can include slow or lossy links, leading to poor throughput. A routing algorithm can select better paths by explicitly taking the quality of the wireless links into account. In this paper, we conduct a detailed, empirical evaluation of the performance of three link-quality metrics---ETX, per-hop RTT, and per-hop packet pair---and compare them against minimum hop count. We study these metrics using a DSR-based routing protocol running in a wireless testbed. We find that the ETX metric has the best performance when all nodes are stationary. We also find that the per-hop RTT and per-hop packet-pair metrics perform poorly due to self-interference. Interestingly, the hop-count metric outperforms all of the link-quality metrics in a scenario where the sender is mobile.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f038122067c60bd680a9dbfaa05df66d7318f00

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Temporal properties of low power wireless links: modeling and implications on multi-hop routing (2005, background): “[13] compared different link quality estimation metrics, showing that the ETX metric [14] performs significantly better than hop-count and packet pair in static wireless environments.”
ExOR: opportunistic multi-hop routing for wireless networks (2005, methodology): “The traditional route is chosen using the ETX metric, which has been shown to find the best routes [4, 5] when the link loss measurements are accurate.”
XORs in the Air: Practical Wireless Network Coding (2006, background): “The proposed solutions range from designing better routing metrics [10, 5, 12 ] to tweaking the TCP protocol [33], and include improved routing and MAC protocols [6, 22, 15].”
Designing routing metrics for mesh networks (2005, methodology): “Third, we show how to use these four requirements to analyze the performance of five existing routing metrics for mesh networks: hop count, ETX [3], [4], ETT [5], WCETT [5] and MIC [6].”
SOAR: Simple Opportunistic Adaptive Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks (2009, methodology): “As in the evaluation of previous routing protocols for mesh networks (e.g., ETX [7], ExOR [2], LQSR [ 8 ]), the source and destination nodes of each flow are randomly selected.”
Opportunistic routing in multi-hop wireless networks (2004, neutral): “networks [17, 18, 12, 5, 7 ]. A routing protocol chooses a path of nodes between the source”
A survey on real-world implementations of mobile ad-hoc networks (2007, methodology): “The experiments presented in [19] study the impact of four different link-quality metrics on overall end-to-end TCP throughput in a 23-node indoor mesh network.”
Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks (2004, methodology): “In a previous paper [17], we showed that in an environment with mobile nodes, the shortest-path metric performs better than ETX.”
Architecture and evaluation of an unplanned 802.11b mesh network (2005, methodology): “This combination of link-state and DSR-style on demand querying was inspired by MCL [14].”
Collection tree protocol (2009, methodology): “However, as the timer length increases past [8,16]ms, goodput drops significantly as the timer introduces idleness.”