Impact of jitter mechanisms on metric-based wireless routing protocols

In many wireless communication protocols, small and random delay, called jitter, is imposed before packet transmission so as to reduce packet collisions. Jitter is recommended for many routing protocols such as AODV and LOADng. Jitter can be exploited to change the order of routes about which destination is informed and, as a result, make better routes, regarding their metric, more likely to choose by the destination. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is only one mechanism, called adaptive jitter mechanism, proposed for metric-based routing protocols. In this paper, we aim to show feasibility of using different random variables for jittering and define some shaping functions to change metric values into random variable's parameters. Analytical and simulation results are presented to show the efficacy of uniform, pareto and exponential jitter. All of these proposed jitter mechanisms improve route quality and some of them even reduce the number of collision and route discovery time.