This paper anal yzes the causes of packetl oss in a 38-node urban mul ti-hop 802.11b network. The patterns and causes oflv# are important in the design of routing and errorcorrection proto colv as wel as in networkplqq"(v The paper makes the fol l owing observations. The distribution of inter-nodel oss rates is rel'RfivD' uniform over the wh ol range oflv$ rates; there is no clq$ threshol separating "in range" and "out of range." Mostls ks have relj tivel stabl el oss rates from one second to the next, though a smal l minority have very burstyl osses at that time scal e. Sign al to-noise ratio and distance have lv tl e predictive val e forl oss rate. Thel arge number of lv ks with intermediate l oss rates is probabl y due to mul ti-path fading rather than attenuation or interference. The phenomena discussed here are al l wel l -known. The contributions of this paper are an understanding of their rel ative importance, of how they interact, and of the impl ications for MAC and routing protocol design.

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Wireless meshnet8Ex8 (WMNs)consist of meshrout6L and meshclient8 where meshroutfix have minimal mobilit and formtr backbone of WMNs. They provide netide access for bot mesh andconvent1)fi8 clientt TheintL gratLfl of WMNs wit ot8 net8866 such as t1Int6fiPx1 cellular, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16, sensor netsor1L ets can be accomplishedtccomp tc gatomp and bridging functng1 in t1 meshroutfijx Meshclient can be eit8fi st8fij1)6x or mobile, and can form aclient meshnet16S amongtng1fifiELj and wit meshroutLfifi WMNs are antLfifl1)6fl t resolvets limit18fiflfl andt significantfl improvetp performance of ad hocnetLEP8L wireless local area net1Pxx (WLANs), wireless personal areanet16fij (WPANs), and wirelessmetess1fifljfl areanet1LPS (WMANs). They are undergoing rapid progress and inspiring numerousdeploymentS WMNs will deliver wireless services for a largevariet ofapplicat6fifl in personal, local, campus, andmet8Lfix1)6fi areas. Despit recent advances in wireless mesh netjLfiP1)6 many research challenges remain in allprotjfiS layers. This paperpresent adetEfl81 stEonrecent advances and open research issues in WMNs. Syst1 architL881)6 andapplicat)68 of WMNs are described, followed by discussingts critssi factss influencingprotenc design.Theoret8fiL netore capacit and tdst1LLSjx tt1LL protLLSj for WMNs are exploredwit anobjectE1 t point out a number of open research issues. Finally,tnal beds,indust681 pract68 andcurrent strent actntx1) relatt t WMNs arehighlight8x # 2004 Elsevier B.V. Allrl rl KedI7-8 Wireless meshnet186flfl Ad hocnet8jEES Wireless sensornetor16fl Medium accessconts1fi Routs1 prots1fiS Transport protspor ScalabilitS Securiti Powermanagement andcontfi8fl Timingsynchronizat ion 1389-1286/$ - seefront matt # 2004 Elsevier B.V. Allright reserved. doi:10....

This paper evaluates the ability of a wireless mesh architecture to provide high performance Internet access while demanding little deployment planning or operational management. The architecture considered in this paper has unplanned node placement (rather than planned topology), omni-directional antennas (rather than directional links), and multi-hop routing (rather than single-hop base stations). These design decisions contribute to ease of deployment, an important requirement for community wireless networks. However, this architecture carries the risk that lack of planning might render the network’s performance unusably low. For example, it might be necessary to place nodes carefully to ensure connectivity; the omni-directional antennas might provide uselessly short radio ranges; or the inefficiency of multi-hop forwarding might leave some users effectively disconnected. The paper evaluates this unplanned mesh architecture with a case study of the Roofnet 802.11b mesh network. Roofnet consists of 37 nodes spread over four square kilometers of an urban area. The network provides users with usable performance despite lack of planning: the average inter-node throughput is 627 kbits/second, even though the average route has three hops. The paper evaluates multiple aspects of the architecture: the effect of node density on connectivity and throughput; the characteristics of the links that the routing protocol elects to use; the usefulness of the highly connected mesh afforded by omni-directional antennas for robustness and throughput; and the potential performance of a single-hop network using the same nodes as Roofnet.

This paper describes ExOR, an integrated routing and MAC protocol that increases the throughput of large unicast transfers in multi-hop wireless networks. ExOR chooses each hop of a packet’s route after the transmission for that hop, so that the choice can reflect which intermediate nodes actually received the transmission. This deferred choice gives each transmission multiple opportunities to make progress. As a result ExOR can use long radio links with high loss rates, which would be avoided by traditional routing. ExOR increases a connection’s throughput while using no more network capacity than traditional routing. ExOR’s design faces the following challenges. The nodes that receive each packet must agree on their identities and choose one forwarder. The agreement protocol must have low overhead, but must also be robust enough that it rarely forwards a packet zero times or more than once. Finally, ExOR must choose the forwarder with the lowest remaining cost to the ultimate destination. Measurements of an implementation on a 38-node 802.11b test-bed show that ExOR increases throughput for most node pairs when compared with traditional routing. For pairs between which traditional routing uses one or two hops, ExOR’s robust acknowledgments prevent unnecessary retransmissions, increasing throughput by nearly 35%. For more distant pairs, ExOR takes advantage of the choice of forwarders to provide throughput gains of a factor of two to four.

Routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have traditionally focused on finding paths with minimum hop count. However, such paths can include slow or lossy links, leading to poor throughput. A routing algorithm can select better paths by explicitly taking the quality of the wireless links into account. In this paper, we conduct a detailed, empirical evaluation of the performance of three link-quality metrics— ETX, per-hop RTT, and per-hop packet pair—and compare them against minimum hop count. We study these metrics using a DSR-based routing protocol running in a wireless testbed. We find that the ETX metric has the best performance when all nodes are stationary. We also find that the per-hop RTT and per-hop packet-pair metrics perform poorly due to self-interference. Interestingly, the hop-count metric outperforms all of the link-quality metrics in a scenario where the sender is mobile.

This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that COPE largely increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.

Abstract — The wireless sensor networks community, has now an increased understanding of the need for realistic link layer models. Recent experimental studies have shown that real deployments have a “transitional region ” with highly unreliable links, and that therefore the idealized perfect-reception-within-range models used in common network simulation tools can be very misleading. In this paper, we use mathematical techniques from communication theory to model and analyze low power wireless links. The primary contribution of this work is the identification of the causes of the transitional region, and a quantification of their influence. Specifically, we derive expressions for the packet reception rate as a function of distance, and for the width of the transitional region. These expressions incorporate important channel and radio parameters such as the path loss exponent and shadowing variance of the channel; and the modulation and encoding of the radio. A key finding is that for radios using narrow-band modulation, the transitional region is not an artifact of the radio non-ideality, as it would exist even with perfectthreshold receivers because of multi-path fading. However, we hypothesize that radios with mechanisms to combat multi-path effects, such as spread-spectrum and diversity techniques, can reduce the transitional region. I.

Next generation fixed wireless broadband networks are being increasingly deployed as mesh networks in order to provide and extend access to the internet. These networks are characterized by the use of multiple orthogonal channels and nodes with the ability to simultaneously communicate with many neighbors using multiple radios (interfaces) over orthogonal channels. Networks based on the IEEE 802.11a/b/g and 802.16 standards are examples of these systems. However, due to the limited number of available orthogonal channels, interference is still a factor in such networks. In this paper, we propose a network model that captures the key practical aspects of such systems and characterize the constraints binding their behavior. We provide necessary conditions to verify the feasibility of rate vectors in these networks, and use them to derive upper bounds on the capacity in terms of achievable throughput, using a fast primal-dual algorithm. We then develop two link channel assignment schemes, one static and the other dynamic, in order to derive lower bounds on the achievable throughput. We demonstrate through simulations that the dynamic link channel assignment scheme performs close to optimal on the average, while the static link channel assignment algorithm also performs very well. The methods proposed in this paper can be a valuable tool for network designers in planning network deployment and for optimizing different performance objectives.

Opportunistic routing is a recent technique that achieves high throughput in the face of lossy wireless links. The current opportunistic routing protocol, ExOR, ties the MAC with routing, imposing a strict schedule on routers ’ access to the medium. Although the scheduler delivers opportunistic gains, it misses some of the inherent features of the 802.11 MAC. For example, it prevents spatial reuse and thus may underutilize the wireless medium. It also eliminates the layering abstraction, making the protocol less amenable to extensions to alternate traffic types such as multicast. This paper presents MORE, a MAC-independent opportunistic routing protocol. MORE randomly mixes packets before forwarding them. This randomness ensures that routers that hear the same transmission do not forward the same packets. Thus, MORE needs no special scheduler to coordinate routers and can run directly on top of 802.11. Experimental results from a 20-node wireless testbed show that MORE’s median unicast throughput is 22 % higher than ExOR, and the gains rise to 45 % over ExOR when there is a chance of spatial reuse. For multicast, MORE’s gains increase with the number of destinations, and are 35-200 % greater than ExOR.