Traditional ad-hoc routing protocols typically choose minimum hop paths for transmissions. In a multi-rate environment, where nodes may elect between several transmission rates in order to accommodate different channel conditions, these protocols usually choose paths that contain long range links, with low effective throughput and low reliability. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for reactive routing protocols that leads to the election of high throughput routes while not increasing significantly the signaling overhead. By allowing a node to have a complete knowledge of its one-hop neighborhood topology, we are able to increase significantly the performance of the network through the improvement of the route election process on multi-rate environments.

Peer Reviewed