Relay-aided high-throughput path selection in multi-rate wireless mesh networks
Bipul Sen, Xin Zhao, Lavy Libman, Sanjay Kumar Jha · 2012
This paper proposes an opportunistic rate-adaptive expected transmission time (ORETT) metric, which exploits cooperative (relay-aided) retransmissions to achieve high-throughput routing in multi-rate wireless mesh networks. This metric captures the combined effects of MAC-layer cooperative retransmission by neighbor nodes with transmission rate diversity (and rate-dependent link quality). In our approach, a relay node is selected among one-hop neighbors to assist with packet retransmissions and minimize the expected retransmission time. The paper describes the design and implementation of the ORETT routing metric using the DSR routing protocol. Our extensive simulation on the Qualnet platform confirms that multi-rate routing using ORETT significantly reduces the overall transmission time while yielding higher packet delivery ratio compared to single rate unicast or non-cooperative ETT based routing.