On the Link-Quality Aware Routing in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks: A Throughput-Stability Trade-Off Study

There are considerable researches focused on routing in wireless multi-hop networks dealing with random and unpredictable channel variations. As it is well-known that using the shortest path in terms of number of hops often leads to poor performance, most of the recent research efforts propose various link quality aware metrics. Yet, there is not many works addressing the stability issue of link quality aware routing which can be extremely important specially in providing quality of service for jitter sensitive applications. In this paper, we address the stability vs. throughput trade-off. We argue that a more reactive routing responds faster to link quality changes. This leads to detect the lossy channel faster and so converges to the higher quality path in a shorter time. Meanwhile, fast reacting to channel variations may produce higher path flapping and consequently higher jitter level.