Cross-layer design of outage optimum routing metric for wireless ad hoc networks

A new routing metric for multihop wireless ad hoc networks is presented. The proposed metric is based on the computation of signal-to-noise ratio and path minimization of wireless ad hoc network outage probability in a fading environment. This metric improves the quality of service by reducing the number of dropped packets. Further, by modeling the network with a Trellis diagram and then using Viterbi algorithm to select the best routing path, we reduce the routing complexity of our approach. The performance of the proposed metric is compared with other commonly used routing metrics such as minimum hop count, expected transmission count, and two other signal-to-noise ratio-based metrics in both mobile and stationary networks. Simulation results demonstrate the improvement achieved by this new metric. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.