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Link-level Measurements from an 802.11b Mesh Network

Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Glenn Judd and Robert Morris

Abstract

This paper analyzes the causes of packet loss in a 38-node urban multi-hop 802.11b network. The patterns and causes of loss are important in the design of routing and error-correction protocols, as well as in network planning.

This paper makes the following observations. The distribution of inter-node loss rates is relatively uniform over the whole range of loss rates; there is no clear theshold separating "in range" and "out of range." Most links have relatively stable loss rates from one second to the next, though a small minotiry have very bursty losses at that time scale. Signal-to-noise ratio and distance have little predictive value for loss rate. The large number of links with intermediate loss rates is probably due to multi-path fading rather than attenuation or interference.

The prenomena discussed here are all well-known. The contributions of this paper are an understanding of their relative importance, of how they interact, and of the implications for MAC and routing protocol design.

In the Proceedings of SIGCOMM 2004, Portland, OR, Aug, 2004 Winner of the Best Student Paper Award. (BibTeX entry)