Metrics for characterizing radio links in a frequency-hop packet radio network

For efficient and reliable routing in a store-and-forward mobile packet radio network that supports multimedia traffic, the routing protocols must account for the suitability of each link to handle each type of traffic. The approach presented is based on a family of link metrics, one metric for each type of traffic. The metric for a particular traffic type is designed to measure the ability of a link to meet the service requirements for that traffic type. The family of metrics is applied to each link in the network to provide a family of link resistances. For each type of traffic the resistance values for the links in a route between a source-destination pair are combined to determine the resistance of that route, and a distance-vector routing algorithm is employed to find the routes of least resistance through the network. Two topics investigated in this paper are the sensitivity of the throughput performance to the number of frame erasures that are permitted in voice transmissions and the use of a reservation-based channel-access method