Ambient noise in wireless mesh networks: Evaluation and proposal of an adaptive algorithm to mitigate link removal

Ambient noise is one of the major problems in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). It is responsible for adverse effects on communications such as packet dropping, which dramatically affects the behaviour of ad hoc routing protocols, a key element of these networks. This issue is of prime importance for WMNs since the loss of communication links experienced by nodes may strongly increase the convergence time of the network. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of this problem makes it difficult to address with traditional techniques. The contribution of this paper goes in the direction of (i) exploring this problem by assessing the behaviour of three state-of-the-art routing protocols in the presence of ambient noise (OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N and Babel) and (ii) improving the resilience capabilities of these protocols against ambient noise by proposing an algorithm for the link quality-based adaptive replication of packets, named LARK. The goal of LARK is 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 WMNs. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.