How to evaluate exotic wireless routing protocols
Dimitrios Koutsonikolas, Y. Charlie Hu, Konstantina Papagiannaki · 2008
The advent of static wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has largely shifted the design goals of wireless routing protocols from maintaining connectivity among routers to providing high throughput. The change of design goals has led to the creation of many “exotic ” optimization techniques such as opportunistic routing and network coding, that promise a dramatic increase in overall network throughput. These “exotic” techniques have also moved many mechanisms such as reliability and rate control, that used to be below or above the routing layer in traditional protocols, to the routing layer. In this paper, we first review the above evolution of routing protocol design and show that the consolidation of mechanisms from multiple layers into the routing layer poses new challenges to the methodology for evaluating and comparing this new generation of routing protocols. We then discuss the diverse set of current practices in evaluating recently proposed protocols and their strengths and weaknesses. Our discussion suggests that there is an urgent need to carefully rethink the implications of the new merged-layer routing protocol design and develop effective methodologies for meaningful and fair comparison of these protocols. Finally, we make several concrete suggestions on the desired evaluation methodology. In particular, we show that the traffic sending rate plays a fundamental role and should be carefully controlled.