Designing routing metrics for mesh networks

Designing routing metrics is critical for performance in wireless mesh networks. The unique characteristics of mesh networks, such as static nodes and the shared nature of the wireless medium, invalidate existing solutions from both wired and wireless networks and impose unique requirements on designing routing metrics for mesh networks. In this paper, we focus on identifying these requirements. We first analyze the possible types of routing protocols that can be used and show that proactive hop-by-hop routing protocols are the most appropriate for mesh networks. Then, we examine the requirements for designing routing metrics according to the characteristics of mesh networks and the type of routing protocols used. Finally, we study several existing routing metrics, including hop count, ETX, ETT, WCETT and MIC in terms of their ability to satisfy these requirements. Our simulation results of the performance of these metrics confirm our analysis of these metrics.

[1]  Mario Gerla,et al.  Global state routing: a new routing scheme for ad-hoc wireless networks , 1998, ICC '98. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Record. Affiliated with SUPERCOMM'98 (Cat. No.98CH36220).

[2]  Eric Anderson,et al.  On the stability of adaptive routing in the presence of congestion control , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[3]  Kevin R. Fall,et al.  Ns: notes and documentation , 1997 .

[4]  Sung-Ju Lee,et al.  Dynamic load-aware routing in ad hoc networks , 2001, ICC 2001. IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Record (Cat. No.01CH37240).

[5]  Charles E. Perkins,et al.  Highly Dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV) for mobile computers , 1994, SIGCOMM.

[6]  Jitendra Padhye,et al.  Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks , 2004, MobiCom '04.

[7]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  Multichannel wireless networks: capacity and protocols , 2006 .

[8]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  a high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing , 2003, MobiCom '03.

[9]  Charles E. Perkins,et al.  Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector routing , 1999, Proceedings WMCSA'99. Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications.

[10]  A. Khanna,et al.  The revised ARPANET routing metric , 1989, SIGCOMM '89.

[11]  Charles E. Perkins,et al.  Highly dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for mobile computers , 1994, SIGCOMM.

[12]  Edward W. Knightly,et al.  End-to-end performance and fairness in multihop wireless backhaul networks , 2004, MobiCom '04.

[13]  Jitendra Padhye,et al.  Comparison of routing metrics for static multi-hop wireless networks , 2004, SIGCOMM '04.

[14]  Hossam S. Hassanein,et al.  Routing with load balancing in wireless Ad hoc networks , 2001, MSWIM '01.

[15]  Roger Karrer,et al.  Enabling large-scale wireless broadband , 2004, Comput. Commun. Rev..

[16]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  Capacity of multi-channel wireless networks: impact of number of channels and interfaces , 2005, MobiCom '05.

[17]  João L. Sobrinho,et al.  Network routing with path vector protocols: theory and applications , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[18]  Robin Kravets,et al.  Interference-aware Load Balancing for Multihop Wireless Networks , 2005 .

[19]  David A. Maltz,et al.  Dynamic Source Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks , 1994, Mobidata.

[20]  João L. Sobrinho,et al.  Algebra and algorithms for QoS path computation and hop-by-hop routing in the Internet , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).