A Link-Quality Aware Routing Metric for Multi-hop Wireless Network

In current multi-hop wireless networks, the routing protocol typically choose the path with the hop count metric. Hop count metric tends to include longer distance link with bad link quality, which then affects the average throughput. In this paper we propose a link-quality aware routing metric for multi-hop wireless networks. This new routing metric simultaneously considers the hop count and the link quality. We considers hop count metric first, if there exists other paths having equal hop count or less than the first one, then it chooses the path with the largest sum of the average smoothed-SNR(SSNR) value and the minimum SSNR value in the path. Also it avoids including bad quality links. Meanwhile we modify the routing selection process to implement our routing metric. According to the simulation results, the average throughput of our proposed routing metric is 12% more than that of hop count metric.