Towards a life without link estimation

Olaf Landsiedel, Mikael Johansson

Abstract: Link estimation provides a long-term estimate of the quality of a link based on its past history. However, this need for a history of past packets is also its main drawback: First, most link estimators only adapt slowly to changing link conditions, being mainly designed to identify long-term stable links. As a result they leave out bursty, potentially long ranging links [2, 4]. Second, in low traffic environments, as seen in many of today's typically heavily duty-cycled application-slink estimates are potentially outdated as they are based on old packets. Finally, it requires to store estimates, i.e., state information, for its neighbors, and (4) relies on beacons to probe links.