Evaluation of Cross-Layer Rate-Aware Routing in a Wireless Mesh Network Test Bed

Real deployments of wireless multi-hop networks, by Internet Service Providers (ISP), have been slowed down by their poor performance and unreliability. The research community has already proved that efficient cross-layer routing, in particular rate-aware routing, can significantly improve performances. Nevertheless, this work has been done mainly by simulations, seldom being implemented in a real environment. We present in this paper the results we obtained by comparing the performances of the traditional routing approach based on the hop-count metric and the cross-layer routing approach based on the transmission rate metric. These measurements have been done on the MeshDVNet test-bed we deployed in our laboratory. As a routing protocol we used two versions (with and without cross-layer metric) of MeshDV, a simple routing protocol expressly designed for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). As our tests clearly show, cross-layer rate-aware metric gives important improvements, in both connectivity and throughput.