Performance evaluation of routing metrics for community Wireless Mesh Networks

With the growth of different types of Internet traffic, there is a compelling need to provide better quality of service especially over the increasing number of wireless networks. Expected Transmission Count (ETX) is a high throughput route selection metric developed for routing protocols used in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Using the minimum hop count to find the shortest path has been shown to be inadequate for WMNs as the selected routes often include the weakest links. This paper presents a performance evaluation comparing hop count and ETX when used with the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol. This study is based on the wireless mesh network topology of a suburban residential area in New Zealand, and analyses the performance of three common Internet traffic types in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss ratio, and presents findings that are closer to the perspective of what an end user experiences.