Routing over Best Links is not necessarily Better in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

The conventional approach of choosing the best route to carry network traffic in wireless multi-hop networks does not maximize the overall network throughput and can lead to short-term instabilities in network state with dire consequences. To date, wireless network route selection considers mainly network or link metrics, always picking the best links, thus channeling all packets through a subset of all available links. This leaves weaker links under-utilized although such links can in fact be used to carry smaller packets or packets with less stringent requirements and free up bandwidth on the better links for larger packets or traffic with higher service requirements. As network traffic volume and heterogeneity increase in future networks, we need to maximize the usage of available network bandwidth and distribute the network traffic load. We combine network link metrics and packet attributes to determine the successful packet transmission probability, and then use this outcome to pick suitable links to forward the packet, which is not necessarily the link with the best metric. To validate the efficacy of our proposed approach in routing performance and energy efficiency, we applied it in routing for wireless multi-hop networks. More importantly, we are able to spread the traffic across nodes in the network, thus achieving better network load-balancing and higher network resource utilization.