A Unified Metric for Routing and Rate Adaptation in Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, the authors propose a new metric that is applicable both to routing and rate adaptation in multi-rate wireless mesh networks. Unlike many previous efforts, the metric is comprehensive; it considers several factors that affect end-to-end performance such as the effect of the relative positions of the links on a path when choosing the rates of operation and the importance of avoiding congested areas. They call the metric ETM (for Expected Transmission cost in Multi-rate wireless networks). They analytically derive the ETM metric. They show that the ETM metric can be used to determine the best end-to-end path with a greedy routing approach and it can be used to dynamically select the best transmission rate for each link on the path via a dynamic programming approach.