Insights into the Routing Stability of a Multi-hop Wireless Testbed - (Invited Paper)

By nature, links in multi-hop wireless networks have an unpredictable behavior, which directly affects the stability of routes. In this paper, we investigate the stability of the network by addressing some interesting questions related to the presence of both dominant and subdominant routes between nodes, in a real deployment. We focus on the persistence of the dominant route and the first four sub-dominant routes. 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 fades.