Experimental Performance Analysis of Routing Metrics in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper provides a description of a wireless mesh network testbed setup and a measurement-based performance evaluation of the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol [7] under three different routing metrics. The considered metrics include hop-count, ETX and ETT. The network performances are evaluated in an indoor testbed formed by heterogeneous MIMO devices. A part of our tests was about the impact of 802.11n features on the network performances showing the importance of lower layers consideration. Our measurements point out the shortcoming of each metric and eventual optimizations towards a more efficient routing. Experimental results show that OLSR-ETT outperforms OLSR-ETX and OLSR-hopcount significantly in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay, and efficiency.