An efficient RSSI-aware metric for wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a RSSI-aware (rETT) routing metric for WMN. The embedded RSSI information from the mesh nodes are extracted, processed, transformed and incorporated into the routing process. The performance of the rETT metric is then optimised and the results compared with the fundamental hop count metric and the link quality metric by Expected Transmission Count (ETX). The implementation results on OLSR show that rETT improvement on network throughput is more than double (120%) compared to hop count and a 21% improvement compared to ETX. Also, an improvement of 33% was achieved in network delay compared to hop count and 28% better than ETX. This work provides a valuable insight into adapting RSSI information in mesh network routing and the implementation method ensures that the results are realistic.