On supporting high-throughput routing metrics in on-demand routing protocols for multi-hop wireless networks

Researchers have proposed routing metrics other than hop count, such as ETX (expected transmission count) and ETT (expected transmission time), to find routes with high throughput. These metrics are inherently suitable to be used in source routing protocols such as DSR, because link state information needs to be collected for the calculation of the shortest path. In this paper, we propose an efficient and generalized approach called accumulated path metric (APM) for supporting high-throughput metrics (HTMs) in on-demand routing protocols. One advantage of APM is that it is able to find the shortest path, in terms of a particular metric, without collecting topology information and without running a shortest-path algorithm. This will significantly simplify the existing design of supporting HTMs in DSR. We present a proof of the correctness of APM. Moreover, we address the problem of duplicate RREQ (route request) transmissions with existing HTM schemes and present a broadcast ordering (BO) technique to suppress unnecessary RREQ transmissions. We study the performance of APM and BO in both AODV and DSR, and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.