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Routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have traditionally focused on finding paths with minimum hop count. However, such paths can include slow or lossy links, leading to poor throughput. A routing algorithm can select better paths by explicitly taking the quality of the wireless links into account. In this paper, we conduct a detailed, empirical evaluation of the performance of three link-quality metrics---ETX, per-hop RTT, and per-hop packet pair---and compare them against minimum hop count. We study these metrics using a DSR-based routing protocol running in a wireless testbed. We find that the ETX metric has the best performance when all nodes are stationary. We also find that the per-hop RTT and per-hop packet-pair metrics perform poorly due to self-interference. Interestingly, the hop-count metric outperforms all of the link-quality metrics in a scenario where the sender is mobile.
Draves et al. (Mon,) studied this question.