Evaluation of cross-layer rate-aware routing in a wireless mesh network test bed

Abstract

Real deployments of wireless multihop networks, by Internet service providers (ISPs), have been slowed down by their poor performance and unreliability. The research community has already proved that efficient cross-layer routing, in particular rate-aware routing, can significantly improve performances. Nevertheless, this work has been done mainly by simulations, seldom being implemented in a real environment. We present in this paper the results we obtained by comparing the performances of the traditional routing approach based on the hop-count metric and the cross-layer routing approach based on the transmission rate metric. These measurements have been done on the MeshDVNet test bed we deployed in our laboratory. As a routing protocol, we used two versions (with and without cross-layer metric) of MeshDV, a simple routing protocol expressly designed for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). As our tests clearly show, cross-layer rate-aware metric gives important improvements, in both connectivity and throughput.