LQHR: A Link Quality-based Hybrid Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a link quality-based hybrid routing (LQHR) protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. LQHR takes account of link quality such as SNR between adjacent nodes and the link utilization level of each node. In LQHR, each node maintains routing information produced by OLSR, which is a proactive routing protocol for ad hoc networks. When a source makes a communication request, it finds a route to the destination node on the basis of the link quality. We implemented LQHR on an experimental network, where laptop PCs were arranged on the same floor of a building, and audio-video streams were transmitted along a route selected by LQHR. To evaluate the effectiveness of LQHR in audio-video transmission, we compared application-level QoS of LQHR with that of the standard OLSR in the presence of another traffic flow in the network. As a result, we found that the routes selected by LQHR can provide shorter transmission delays and lower loss ratios in the transmission of the audio-video streams than those selected by the standard OLSR