Mitigating the impact of ambient noise on Wireless Mesh Networks using adaptive link-quality-based packet replication

Abstract

Wireless Mesh networks (WMN) typically rely on proactive routing protocols to establish optimal communication routes between every pair of system nodes. These protocols integrate link-quality-based mechanisms to minimise the adverse effect of ambient noise on communications. This paper shows the limitations existing in such mechanisms by analysing the impact of ambient noise on three state-of-the-art proactive routing protocols: OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N and Babel. As will be shown, the lack of context-awareness in their link-quality mechanisms prevents the protocols from adjusting their behaviour according to persistent levels of ambient noise, which may vary along the time. Consequently, they cannot minimise the impact of such noise on the availability of network routes. This issue is very serious for a WMN since the loss communication links may strongly increase the convergence time of the network. An adaptive extension to studied link-quality-based mechanisms is proposed to avoid the loss of communication links in the presence of high levels of ambient noise. The effectiveness of the proposal is experimentally assessed, thus establishing a new method to reduce the impact of ambient noise on WMN.