An empirical comparison of throughput-maximizing wireless mesh routing protocols

Abstract

Communication quality of wireless network links is heavily dependent on various external factors such as physical geometry of environmental objects and interference among radio signal sources. As a result, the radio channel quality of real-world wireless networks tends to exhibit both short-term and long-term temporal variations that are in general difficult to model analytically. There has been a large body of research on maximizing the overall throughput of wireless mesh networks through dynamic load/capacity measurement and adaptive routing. However, so far there is no comprehensive evaluation of different protocol mechanisms on a real wireless network testbed. In this paper we first identify the major design dimensions of throughput-maximizing wireless mesh network routing protocols: wireless link capacity estimation, routing path selection, and adaptation to temporal link quality fluctuation, and empirically quantify the performance comparison of various alternatives in each dimension using both software simulations and a miniaturized multi-hop wireless network testbed– MiNT-m.