Routing Metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Routing in wireless mesh networks has been an active area of research for many years, with many proposed routing protocols selecting shortest paths that minimize the path hop count. Whereas minimum hop count is the most popular metric in wired networks, in wireless networks interference- and energy- related considerations give rise to more complex trade-offs. Therefore, a variety of routing metrics has been proposed especially for wireless mesh networks providing routing algorithms with high flexibility in the selection of best path as a compromise among throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption. In this paper, we present a detailed survey and taxonomy of routing metrics. These metrics may have broadly different optimization objectives (e.g., optimize application performance, maximize battery lifetime, maximize network throughput), different methods to collect the required information to produce metric values, and different ways to derive the end-to-end route quality out of the individual link quality metrics. The presentation of the metrics is highly comparative, with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses and their application to various types of network scenarios. We also discuss the main implications for practitioners and identify open issues for further research in the area.