On the route discovery latency of wireless mesh networks

Designed and developed for military communications in their early stage, multi-hop wireless ad hoc network is attracting interest from commercial applications and becoming a research hot spot. Although the technology has been studied for about a decade, there still exist some problems to be solved. Route discovery latency for reactive routing protocols is one of them. In this paper, we propose a dynamic RTT-based algorithm which can dramatically reduce the route discovery latency. This algorithm can be generally applied to any source selection based reactive routing protocols. Our simulation study has also shown some interesting results about packet transmission time and route discovery latency in a contention-based channel like IEEE 802.11 which have not been discussed before.