TY - GEN A1 - Chatharajupalli, Navya Sneha A1 - Rotta, Randolf A1 - Karnapke, Reinhardt A1 - Nolte, Jörg T1 - Probing considered harmful : leveraging RSSI for link quality prediction T2 - Proceedings of the IEEE 50th Conference on Local Computer Networks : LCN 2025 : October 14-16, 2025, Sydney, Australia N2 - Wireless mesh protocols that use a routing metric based on throughput or airtime require predictions about future throughput for all mesh neighbors. Typically, the Wi-Fi rate controller provides this information, and state-of-the-art rate control algorithms estimate it based on statistics from past unicast transmissions. This introduces an adverse cross-layer dependency because meaningful statistics are only available for the links that were used by the routing layer. Existing implementations either ignore this, or use other routing metrics, such as distance, or generate artificial periodic probe traffic to all neighbors. Unfortunately, probing reacts slowly to changing conditions, increases the medium contention, and can lead to overly optimistic predictions. To overcome this, we introduce an RSSI-based link quality prediction for the routing layer. Benchmarks in a B.A.T.M.A.N. version V mesh show a decrease of round-trip time by three orders of magnitude and an increase of the end-to-end packet delivery ratio. TCP connections became possible over long routes that were previously unusable. Although highly imprecise, the easy to acquire RSSI provided sufficiently good predictions for our mesh network. KW - Wireless Mesh Network KW - Multi-hop routing KW - Neural Networks KW - Machine Learning KW - Link quality predictors Y1 - 2025 SN - 979-8-3315-3704-3 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/LCN65610.2025.11146347 SN - 2831-7742 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - IEEE CY - New York, NY ER - TY - GEN A1 - Chatharajupalli, Navya Sneha A1 - Rotta, Randolf A1 - Karnapke, Reinhardt A1 - Nolte, Jörg T1 - VibroMote : Wi-Fi-based mesh communication for railway bridge inspection and monitoring T2 - 2025 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC) N2 - Vibration sensing provides insights into the dynamic behaviour of engineering constructions such as railway bridges. Cable-based sensors are viable only for long-term condition monitoring and rare special inspections because of the labor-intensive deployment. Although wireless sensors significantly reduce this overhead, their energy constraints limited the network throughput and, hence, their resolution in space and time. Batteryor solar-powered sensor nodes with high network throughput would enable in-depth measurements during regular inspections and improve the access to high-quality monitoring data. We present “VibroMote”, which combines energy harvesting, a high-bandwidth 3-axis MEMS accelerometer, and high-throughput, self-organizing mesh communication via IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi. The evaluation on a real bridge with 18 VibroMotes shows that the deployment time can be reduced from hours to minutes; the multi-hop mesh provides sufficient throughput reserves for the application whereas direct one-hop communication failed; the battery runtime is sufficient for temporary measurements during inspections; and the energy consumption during sleep modes would be low enough for solar-powered long-term monitoring. Hence, the combination of high-throughput Wi-Fi with mesh networking is a strong alternative to the commonly used low-power radio technologies when long range between the sensors is not needed. KW - Wireless Mesh Network KW - Condition Monitoring KW - Multi-hop routing KW - Wi-Fi Mesh Y1 - 2025 SN - 978-1-6654-5769-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/ISNCC66965.2025.11250402 SN - 2768-0940 SP - 1 EP - 6 PB - IEEE CY - Piscataway, NJ ER -