An enhanced cross-layer routing protocol for wireless mesh networks based on received signal strength
Abstract
The research work presents an enhanced cross-layer routing solution for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) based on Received Signal Strength. WMN is an emerging technology with varied applications due to inherent advantages ranging from self-organisation to auto-con guration. Routing in WMN is fundamen- tally achieved by hop counts which have been proven to be de cient in terms of network performance. The realistic need to enhance the link quality metric to improve network performance has been a growing concern in recent times. The cross-Layer routing approach is one of the identi ed methods of improving routing process in Wireless technology. This work presents an RSSI-aware routing metric implemented on Optimized Link-State Routing (OLSR) for WMN. The embedded Received Signal Strength Information (RSSI) from the mesh nodes on the network is extracted, processed, transformed and incorporated into the routing process. This is to estimate efficiently the link quality for network path selections to improved network performance. The measured RSSI data is filtered by an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) filter. This novel routing metric method is called RSSI-aware ETT (rETT). The performance of rETT is then optimised and the results compared with the fundamental hop count metric and the link quality metric by Expected Transmission Counts (ETX). The results reveal some characteristics of RSSI samples and link conditions through the analysis of the statistical data. The divergence or variability of the samples is a function of interference and multi-path e effect on the link. The implementation results show that the routing metric with rETT is more intelligent at choosing better network paths for the packets than hop count and ETX estimations. rETT improvement on network throughput is more than double (120%) compared to hop counts and 21% improvement compared to ETX. Also, an improvement of 33% was achieved in network delay compared to hop counts and 28% better than ETX. This work brings another perspective into link-quality metric solutions for WMN by using RSSI to drive the metric of the wireless routing protocol. It was carried out on test-beds and the results obtained are more realistic and practical. The proposed metric has shown improvement in performance over the classical hop counts metric and ETX link quality metric.Citation
Amusa, E. (2010) 'An enhanced cross-layer routing protocol for wireless mesh networks based on received signal strength'. PhD Thesis. University of Bedfordshire.Publisher
University of BedfordshireType
Thesis or dissertationLanguage
enDescription
A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The following license files are associated with this item: