Table 2 Comparison of the main characteristics of routing metrics used in low-power wireless networks.
Routing metric | Properties of the metric | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hop count | Awareness of link quality | Quality of all links is distinguished | Link quality estimation method | Nature of the routing protocol | |
Hop count | Yes | No | No | — | — |
Shortest path with link quality threshold [5] | Yes, (considers only good quality links) | Yes | No | Packet-based techniques | Proactive, one-to-one |
Link quality routing [35] | Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes (quantification) | Packet-based techniques | Proactive, one-to-one |
Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes | Packet-based techniques | Proactive, one-to-one and many-to-one | |
MultiHopLQI [6] | Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes | LQI | Proactive, many-to-one |
ZigBee (link quality) [4] | Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes (quantification) | Packet-based techniques/average LQI | Reactive, one-to-one |
Hop count while avoiding weak links [38] | Only when considered paths have the same number of weak links | Yes | No | LQI | Reactive, one-to-one |
No | Yes | No | LQI | Reactive, one-to-many | |
PATH-DR [21] | Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes | LQI | Reactive, one-to-many |
LETX | Yes (implicitly) | Yes | Yes | LQI | Reactive, one-to-one |