An Empirical Comparison of Throughput-Maximizing Wireless Mesh Routing Protocols

Communication quality of wireless network links is heav- ily 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 wire- less mesh networks through dynamic load/capacity measure- ment and adaptive routing. However, so far there is no com- prehensive evaluation of different protocol mechanisms on a real wireless network testbed. In this paper we first iden- tify the major design dimensions of throughput-maximizing wireless mesh network routing protocols: wireless link ca- pacity 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 miniatur- ized multi-hop wireless network testbed– MiNT-m.