Link-quality measurement enhancement for routing in wireless mesh networks

In this paper we introduce a novel distributed and robust link-quality measurement framework, called QualRoute. It exploits the existing traffic in the network in order to estimate accurately the quality of the links. Different from existing methods, our proposed scheme takes advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, and sets up an asynchronous cooperation between neighbors without any extra signaling between the node pairs. The simulation results suggest that the route derived from QualRoute yields to noticeably better performance than the traditional shortest path routes. Moreover, a comparison with a similar link-quality metric which is measured differently confirms the significant impact of the measurement scheme on the overall performance.