A testbed-based study of uni- and multi-path Dynamic Source Routing in a WMN

Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) was one of the first proposed protocols for routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks and is among the few that were ratified by the IETF. Despite its source routing overhead, the protocol exhibits particular properties that make it an optimal choice for multi-path routing where multiple paths are discovered for each destination. The alternative paths can either be stored for error recovery situations or used in parallel to improve the throughput. In this paper we present a study of 10 uni- and multi-path DSR variants in a wireless mesh network testbed. A modified ETX metric is proposed for an improved link quality measurement. The experiments are evaluated considering the routing-overhead and packet delivery ratio with focus on the route discovery.