Limitations and Benefits of Link Quality Prediction in Stochastic Wireless Multihop Networks

In wireless multihop networks, such as wireless sensor networks, link quality (LQ) is one of the most important metrics and is widely used in higher‐layer applications such as routing protocols. An accurate LQ prediction may greatly improve the performance of wireless multihop networks. Researchers have proposed a lot of LQ prediction models in recent years. However, due to the dynamic and stochastic nature of wireless transmission, the performance of LQ prediction is limited. In this article, we mainly analyze the influence of stochastic nature of wireless transmission on LQ prediction models and study the limitation of such models. Then, we discuss the benefits in the application of wireless multihop networks with the performance‐limited LQ prediction models.