Identifying Design Requirements for Wireless Routing Link Metrics

TL;DR

This paper establishes key requirements for designing effective wireless routing link metrics, analyzes existing metrics, and evaluates a new inverse ETX metric's performance within a routing protocol through simulations.

Contribution

It defines essential design criteria for wireless link metrics, implements a novel inverse ETX metric, and assesses its impact on network performance using NS-2 simulations.

Findings

Computational complexity of metrics affects protocol performance

Trade-offs exist between different performance parameters

Inverse ETX offers insights into metric design considerations

Abstract

In this paper, we identify and analyze the requirements to design a new routing link metric for wireless multihop networks. Considering these requirements, when a link metric is proposed, then both the design and implementation of the link metric with a routing protocol become easy. Secondly, the underlying network issues can easily be tackled. Thirdly, an appreciable performance of the network is guaranteed. Along with the existing implementation of three link metrics Expected Transmission Count (ETX), Minimum Delay (MD), and Minimum Loss (ML), we implement inverse ETX; invETX with Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) using NS-2.34. The simulation results show that how the computational burden of a metric degrades the performance of the respective protocol and how a metric has to trade-off between different performance parameters.