A Joint Approach to Routing Metrics and Rate Adaptation in Wireless Mesh Networks

This work proposes MARA, a joint method for automatic rate selection and route quality evaluation in wireless mesh networks. This method targets at avoiding the problem of inaccurate link quality estimates, common to main existing proposals of multi-hop wireless routing metrics. In this proposal, the statistics collected by the routing protocol are used by the rate adaptation algorithm to compute the best rate for each wireless link. This coordinated decision aims at providing better routing and rate choices. Simulation results indicate that MARA leads to an overall improvement in network performance.