An Experimental Analysis of Routing Inconsistency in Indoor Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract — As of today, many routing protocols for wireless mesh networks have been proposed. Nevertheless, quite a few take the high loss rate of control packets into account. This work analyzes the problem of consistent routing information among wireless network nodes. To accomplish this, we propose a metric to evaluate the level of inconsistency among routing tables. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that the high loss rates seen in indoor environments negatively influence route computation. In addition, we demonstrate that the high network dynamics leads to severe instability in next hop selection. Results show that the effect of loss is significant and that the simple manipulation of routing protocol configuration parameters may be not enough to cope with the problem. I