Insights into the Routing Stability of a Multi-hop Wireless Testbed

Links in multi-hop wireless networks have an unpredictable behavior by nature, which directly affects the stability of routes. In this paper, we investigate some interesting questions related to the presence of both dominant and sub-dominant routes between nodes, in a real deployment. We focus on the persistence of the dominant route and the first four sub-dominant routes, to evaluate the stability of the network. The persistence is computed as the percentage of time that a given route is used. We note that source-destination pairs mostly use the dominant route and two sub-dominant routes to communicate, but with a low persistence. We also investigate the number of hops crossed by these routes and their impact on the stability. It turns out that the larger the number of hops, the larger the number of sub-dominant routes. However, when exceeding four hops, the notion of dominance starts disappearing.