Investigation of Across-layer Modification to the DSR Routing Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

This work introduces a cross-layer modification to the DSR protocol that increases the global throughput in wireless mesh networks. In our modified DSR protocol we have introduced the Access Efficiency metric as an alternative to the hop-count metric in order to improve the route selection mechanism. The selected path in the route selection mechanism is identified by choosing the path with the highest minimum Access Efficiency value. We have employed the OPNET modeller as a simulator to examine two different patterns of traffic for a series of randomly generated network topologies. Each topology was simulated twice. One simulation used the original DSR algorithm while the other utilised the modified DSR algorithm. The average throughput was recorded for each run and the percentage improvement for the particular topology was calculated. Our results demonstrate that a significant increase in the global throughput of the networks can be achieved by implementing our modified DSR protocol