Performance Enhancement of a Forwarding Layer for Mesh Networks

In this paper, we introduce our experiences with an ad hoc network and propose an enhancement to the ad hoc routing algorithm. The routing algorithm known as FLAME (Forwarding Layer for Meshing) uses in-band traffic to distribute the routing information instead of providing a separate routing protocol, which means that the routing information is delivered along with the user traffic. An ad hoc network having 4-node linear topology is formed to measure the throughput and the delay with respect to varying hops. The throughput reduces exponentially approximately by 60% for every hop increment. The delay increase approximately linearly for every hop increment. We have also compared the throughput and delay when the routing protocol is applied with those when it is not, to see how much the routing protocol deteriorates the performance for one hop link connection (since more than one hop connection always requires a routing protocol). The cause of the performance degradation for this specific routing protocol has been analyzed. We have enhanced the routing algorithm by changing the broadcast period based on the link usage and the delay has been reduced by 31% on average.