Effective Routing Metric for Wireless Multi-hop Networks

Routing metric is a strategy aimed to identify the path with maximal throughput performance based on the evaluation of different routes. The assessment of routing paths in wireless multi-hop networks is complicated due to diverse link qualities as well as the coexistence of all kinds of interferences within one path. This work summarizes the most popular routing metric schemes used in wireless multi-hop networks, such as the Shortest Path metric, Expected Transmission Count, and Expected Transmission Time, and explains the limitations of these routing metrics. Preliminary extensive measurements on simulations are conducted to compare the performance of current routing metrics and serve as guidelines for the design of an effective routing metric. These preliminary results under simulations indicate that wireless interferences within one path are very crucial to affect the performance of one routing path. However, this interference factor is normally ignored by current routing metrics. Therefore, we propose a routing metric called Effective Routing Metric dubbed ERM. ERM directly diagnoses the interference within one path especially the intra-path interference when evaluating paths' performance and it gives preference to the path with less interference. At the same time, ERM calculates the transmission time more precisely by taking into account the overhead along with each data package transmission. To validate the effectiveness of the ERM metric, we have developed a Linux testbed to explore the performance of the ERM. The results based on simulation and real implementations prove that the routing metric ERM outperforms other routing metrics in case of locating the path that has higher throughput performance.

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