Topology Control Made Practical: Increasing the Performance of Source Routing

Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks need to deal with unstable links. In practice the link quality between neighboring nodes fluctuates significantly over time. In this paper we evaluate the impact of topology control on routing performance. We propose a dynamic version of the XTC topology control algorithm. This simple and strictly local protocol removes unreliable and redundant links from the network. By means of physical experiments on an indoor mica2 testbed we study the beneficial effects of topology control on source routing, one of the most common routing schemes for ad hoc and sensor networks. In particular we compare the performance of source routing with and without topology control. Our results show that topology control reduces route failures, increases network throughput, and diminishes average packet delay.