A New Routing Metric for High Throughput in Dense Ad Hoc Networks

Routing protocols in most ad hoc networks use the length of paths as the routing metric. Recent findings have revealed that the minimum-hop metric can not achieve the maximum throughput because it tries to reduce the number of hops by containing long range links, where packets need to be transmitted at the lowest transmission rate. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between transmission rates and throughputs and show that in dense networks with uniform-distributed traffic, there exists the optimal rate that may not be the lowest rate. Based on our observation, we propose a new routing metric, which measures the expected capability of a path assuming the per-node fairness. We develop a routing protocol based on DSDV and demonstrate that the routing metric enhances the system throughput by 20% compared to the original DSDV.