A Spectrum-Efficient Routing Protocol for Multi-hop 802.11 Networks

Finding the optimal path in multi-hop wireless networks has gained considerable interest in the recent literature. Standard routing methods such as Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) are based on link-level abstraction of the network without fully considering the impact of the physical layer. Recent studies have introduced spectrum-efficient routing algorithms that take into consideration the physical layer characteristics of the wireless network. These studies, however, focused on algorithmic development and theoretical optimality analysis based on generic network settings. This paper closes the gap between algorithm development and protocol implementation by developing a full spectrum-efficient routing protocol implementation for real-world IEEE 802.11 multi-hop networks. Our ns-2 simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed protocol and its superiority over existing routing protocols.