Exploiting Spectrum Spatial Reusability for Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Routing metrics are essential to achieve a good end-to-end throughput on a min-cost path in multi-hop wireless networks. Originally, most routing algorithms were based on min-hop count metric. Then link-quality aware metrics, ETX and ETT, are proposed. After that, the emergence of opportunistic and any-path routing, leads to metrics such as EOTX and EAX. But almost all the previous routing metrics take the sum of all the link weights when choosing a min-cost path. They ignore that a pair of links on a path might be able to transmit at the same time without interference and hence it is inappropriate to include both of their weights in the whole path. In this work, we suggest exploiting such spatial reusability when designing routing metric to improve end-to-end throughput. We propose Spatial Reusability Aware Routing Metric (SAR) with the corresponding Spatial Reusability Aware Routing Algorithm. Our simulation results have shown good improvement in throughput.