Efficient online estimation of bursty wireless links

Rapidly changing link conditions make it difficult to accurately estimate the quality of wireless links and predict the fate of future transmissions. In particular bursty links pose a major challenge to online link estimation due to strong fluctuations in their transmission success rates at short time scales. Therefore, the prevalent approach in routing algorithms is to employ a long term link estimator that selects only consistently stable links - PRR >; 90% - for packet transmissions. The use of bursty links is thus disregarded although these links provide considerable additional resources for the routing process. Based on significant empirical evidence of over 100,000 transmissions over each link in widely used 802.15.4 and 802.11 testbeds, we propose two metrics, Expected Future Transmissions (EFT) and MAC₃, for runtime estimation of bursty wireless links. We introduce the Bursty Link Estimator (BLE) that, based on these two metrics, accurately estimates bursty links in the network rendering them available for packet transmissions.