Performance of a Forwarding Layer for Mesh Network

In this paper, we introduce our experience with implementation of an ad hoc network. The routing algorithm uses in-band traffic to distribute the routing information instead of providing a separate routing protocol. A 4 hop straight line topology ad hoc network is established for measuring the throughput in terms of hops. The experimental results show that the throughput reduces exponentially approximately by 60% for every hop increment. The delay seems to increase linearly for every hop increment. We have also compared the throughput and delay when the routing protocol is applied with those when it is not, to see how much the routing protocol affects the performance for one hop link connection. We have found that the routing protocol indeed consumes network resources such that the throughput reduces by 6.45% and the delay by 95.8%. The cause of the performance degradation for this specific routing protocol has been analyzed.