Performance measurement study in a wireless OLSR-ETX mesh network

We present a performance measurement study carried out in a city-wide mesh network with more than 200 nodes. The network nodes use IEEE 802.11a/bg/n and employ the OLSR protocol in conjunction with the ETX metric. The study was conducted to evaluate the network performance in terms of throughput, packet loss, latency, and jitter and the dependency of these parameters on the routing metric. For the study, about 15,000 samples were collected over the course of five months. In this paper, we describe method and background of the study. We apply methods of advanced descriptive statistics to the recorded dataset. Regarding our main question, we find that both ETX and path LQ show a correlation with network performance but do not allow an acceptable estimation. We make the entire dataset publicly available to allow further research.