Research and Improvement on Expected Throughput Metric in Wireless Mesh Network

This paper studied and analyzed expected throughput metric (ETP), found out that it made a conservative estimate for long path, and it didn´t take into account the impact of node´s loading on the performance of path. In view to the problem, this paper assumed the interference range of links as two hops, and proposed the definition of node´s loading in wireless mesh network, and combined the two with ETP metric and obtained the improved ETP metric, i.e. the METPLB. The METPLB metric can provide a more correct link and path performance estimate than ETP metric. So route protocol based on METPLB can choose the path which is more disjoint and has less interference of links that operate on the same channel as its route. By simulating experiments the authors studied the influence of parameter beta of METPLB metric to network performance and analyzed and compared the performance between ETP and METPLB. The simulating results show that in the multi-radio and multi-channel wireless mesh network with heavy traffic and loading, by using METPLB to select path, the throughput can be improved and the end-to-end delay can be reduced, then the loading balance of network can be achieved effectively.