Situation-aware routing based on link quality for static mesh networks with mobile nodes

Abstract

Situation-aware routing seeks to improve quality of service on hybrid wireless mesh networks by making routing decisions based on the current situation of the network. BATMAN-adv is a mesh routing protocol that counts beacons as a link quality metric. We modified BATMAN-adv to give more recently received beacons more weight, thereby giving a more precise indication of the current state of a link. We then compared the original protocol with our modification in a small laboratory test bed. Results show little relation between jitter and packet loss. Jitter is, however, proportional to throughput. The average throughput achieved on both protocols was almost the same but we noticed that the throughput on our modified version increases as the network grows. Our protocol modification suffered from packet loss at low bandwidth rates but this reduces as the transfer rate increases and buffer size shrinks. We conclude that our situationaware protocol modification shows potential to address issues pertaining to scalable and congested static mesh networks with mobile nodes.