Link availability aware routing metric for wireless mesh networks

This paper investigates the design of effective routing metrics in the purpose of network resources optimization and the satisfaction of users QoS requirements. Using several real experiments, we point out the shortcoming of the Expected Transmission Count (ETX) metric for eventual optimizations towards a more efficient routing. Experiments were carried out into an heterogeneous IEEE 802.11n based network running with OLSR routing protocol and have shown that ETX presents several shortcoming resulting in inaccurate estimation of the link quality and then of the routing decision. This paper presents improvements of the ETX metric based on link availibility for accurately finding high-throughput paths in multihop wireless mesh networks.