A Comprehensive Comparison of Routing Metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks

It is well-known that finding paths with minimum hop count leads to poor performance in wireless mesh networks (WMN) because the assumption of the same transmission failure probability in all links may not be true. A routing metric can assist traditional routing protocol in selecting better paths by explicitly taking the interference, delay etc. into account. This paper presents a thorough review and a comparison of 10 kinds of routing metrics designed for diverse QoS requirements in WMN. Meanwhile, this paper classifies these routing metrics into three basic types, ETX-based metrics, mETX, and some other metrics less attractive to WMN routing layer, for better understanding and future applications. To the best of our knowledge, no paper except this one has such a comprehensive review of routing metrics utilized in WMN.