A link-quality and congestion-aware cross layer metric for multi-hop wireless routing

Abstract

Wireless networks suffer from random variations in channel and network condition. This leads to poor performance in multi-hop wireless networks specially with a conventional non-flexible routing. To cope with instability of wireless links, a cross-layer routing that supports adaptivity and optimization across lower layers of protocol stack is needed. Cross layer routing intends to play an essential role in improving the performance of wireless networks but requires a careful attention on the choice of the metric. In this paper we propose a new link-quality and congestion aware metric for multi-hop wireless routing which is obtained from MAC layer. We show that still having a path with reasonable length our proposed metric improves the performance of routing in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput in comparison to minimum-hop count metric