Research Article

Traffic-aware routing for real-time communications in wireless multi-hop networks†

  1. Shouyi Yin1,
  2. Yongqiang Xiong2,
  3. Qian Zhang3,*,
  4. Xiaokang Lin1

Article first published online: 29 AUG 2006

DOI: 10.1002/wcm.444

Issue

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

Special Issue: Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Volume 6, Issue 6, pages 825–843, September 2006

Additional Information

How to Cite

Yin, S., Xiong, Y., Zhang, Q. and Lin, X. (2006), Traffic-aware routing for real-time communications in wireless multi-hop networks. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput., 6: 825–843. doi: 10.1002/wcm.444

Author Information

  1. 1

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  2. 2

    Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China

  3. 3

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

*Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

  1. †

    This work has been done when the first author was visiting wireless and networking group, Microsoft Research Asia.

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 29 AUG 2006
  2. Article first published online: 29 AUG 2006

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Keywords:

  • wireless multi-hop networks;
  • IEEE 802.11 MAC;
  • ad-hoc routing;
  • multi-radio routing;
  • traffic-aware routing;
  • interference;
  • quality of service (QoS);
  • real time communication (RTC)

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel traffic-aware routing metric for real-time communications (RTC) in wireless multi-hop networks. Our routing metric, path predicted transmission time (PPTT), is designed to choose a high-quality path for RTC flow between a source and a destination. PPTT can serve as both single-radio and multi-radio routing metric for RTC flow.

RTC has critical quality of service (QoS) requirements in terms of delay, bandwidth and so on. Traditional measurement-based routing schemes ignore the interference from the coming RTC flow itself (i.e. self-traffic), so they may choose the inefficient path to serve the coming RTC flow due to the inaccurate quality estimation of the transmission path. PPTT takes explicit consideration of both self-traffic and neighbouring traffic interfering with the RTC flow, and thus offers an accurate estimation of path transmission delay. Through differentiating the links by the wireless channel/radio they are using, PPTT has the capability to choose a high-quality path for the coming RTC flow in both single-radio and multi-radio networks.

To evaluate the performance, we implement PPTT scheme and study its performance in a wireless multi-hop testbed consisting of 32 nodes equipped with two IEEE 802.11a/b/g combo cards, and we also conduct extensive simulations with different random topologies in network simulator NS-2 for a more comprehensive comparison. The results of simulation and experiment show that this routing metric outperforms other non-traffic-aware one such as expected transmission count (ETX) and weighted cumulative expected transmission time (WCETT) in terms of delay and goodput in both single-radio and multi-radio wireless networks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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