Experimental Measurement of Overhead Associated with Active Probing of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) represent the next generation wireless networks. The increased capacity of WMNs means that they are now capable of providing backhaul services traditionally maintained by wired networks. The attraction of WMNs is their ease of deployment and ability to self organise, self configure, and self heal. In order to successfully achieve this objective careful consideration must be applied when constructing a WMN. In order to optimise the operation of the network, data should traverse the network by means of the most efficient route. Characterisation and path selection will be determined by the routing algorithm coupled with the link cost metrics. In this paper we experimentally investigate the overhead associated with the estimation of the link quality using the Estimated Transmission Time (ETT) metric.