Link quality aware routing based on effective estimated throughput for mobile ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are multi-hop wireless networks where traffic can be routed through multiple intermediate nodes if direct link between source and destination does not exist. Hence, the specific routing protocols either table-driven or on-demand protocols are required to find paths to destinations. However, most of them consider only hop count without taking into account the link quality in path finding process, and it easily leads to network congestion. Many routing metrics were proposed as the link quality to be used to determine the best path in ad hoc networks. The example metrics are Expected Transmission Count (ETX) and its extensions. However, they are not much accurate to be used to precisely predict the link quality in highly dynamic topology networks. In this work, Effective Estimated Throughput (EET) is proposed as the new routing metric to incorporate the available link bandwidth and the delivery rate in order to accurately predict the path throughput. Various simulation scenarios are constructed in heterogeneous environment where different types of nodes exist. In addition, these scenarios illustrate the ability of the link quality aware routing based on EET metric in supporting multi-rate networks compared to the routing based on hop count and ETX metrics.