An efficient RSSI-aware metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), link quality routing is recently receiving much attention as it helps in improving network performance. However, further research through experimentation is needed to practically and particularly address routing issues in WMN. This paper proposes RSSI-aware (rETT) routing metric for WMN. The embedded RSSI information from the mesh nodes are extracted, processed, transformed and incorporated into the routing process. The performance of rETT metric is then optimised and the results compared with the fundamental hop count metric and the link quality metric by ETX. The implementation results on OLSR show that rETT improvement on network throughput is more than double (120%) compared to hop counts and a 21% improvement compared to ETX. Also, an improvement of 33% was achieved in network delay compared to hop counts and 28% better than ETX. This work provides a valuable insight into adapting RSSI information in mesh network routing and the implementation method ensures that the results are realistic.