Performance Evaluation of Link Quality Estimation Metrics for Static Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

Tao Liu, Ankur Kamthe, Lun Jiang, Alberto Cerpa

Abstract

The lossy nature of wireless communication leads to many challenges while designing multihop networks. As an integral part of reliable communication in wireless networks, effective link estimation is essential for routing protocols. Recent studies have shown that link reliability-based metrics like ETX have better performance than traditional metrics such as hop count or latency. Usually, such metrics employ techniques like blacklisting, involving thresholds during their link estimation process. In this paper, we conduct a detailed performance analysis of three commonly used link-quality metrics in wireless sensor networks: ETX, 4Bit, and RNP. We study the interplay between these metrics and CTP, a tree-based routing protocol provided by TinyOS. The objectives of our experiment are two fold. First, by applying different link-quality metrics to the same routing protocol, we provide extensive evaluation on ETX, 4Bit and RNP with insights on their performance under different criteria. Second, we study the impact of the presence or absence of a blacklisting policy when using these link quality estimation metrics. As to our knowledge, this paper is the first to compare the performance between these link quality based metrics with networks of different qualities under realistic conditions.

Availability

PDF

Reference

Tao Liu, Ankur Kamthe, Lun Jiang, Alberto Cerpa, "Performance Evaluation of Link Quality Estimation Metrics for Static Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks," Proceedings of the Sixth Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2009), pp. 583--591, IEEE, Rome, Province of Rome, Italy, June, 2009.

Bibtex

@Conference{Liu09a,
  author =       "Tao Liu and Ankur Kamthe and Lun Jiang and Alberto
                 Cerpa",
  title =        "Performance Evaluation of Link Quality Estimation
                 Metrics for Static Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the Sixth Annual IEEE Communications
                 Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc
                 Communications and Networks (SECON 2009)",
  year =         "2009",
  pages =        "583--591",
  publisher =    "IEEE",
  address =      "Rome, Province of Rome, Italy",
  month =        jun,
  URL =          "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Liu09a.pdf",
  accept =       "18",
  cited =        "21",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2009 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial purposes. New copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.