Performance Study of ETX based Wireless Routing Metrics

Abstract: Being most popular and IETF standard metric, minimum hop count is appropriately used by Ad hoc Networks, as new paths must rapidly be found in the situations where quality paths could not be found in due time due to high node mobility. There always has been a tradeoff between throughput and energy consumption, but stationary topology of WMNs and high node density of WSN's benefit the algorithms to consider quality-aware routing to choose the best routes. In this paper, we analytically review ongoing research on wireless routing metrics which are based on ETX (Expected Transmission Count) as it performs better than minimum hop count under link availability. Performances over ETX, target platforms and design requirements of these ETX based metrics are high-lighted. Consequences of the criteria being adopted (in addition to expected link layer transmissions & retransmissions) in the form of incremental: (1) performance overheads and computational complexity causing inefficient use of network resources and instability of the routing algorithm, (2) throughput gains achieved with better utilization of wireless medium resources have been elaborated.