The importance of studying wireless interference has long been recognized. For example, in [15] the impact of interference on fairness is considered. In [19] it is shown that paths with high degree of interference suffer disproportionately. Several researchers [8,13,10,12] have considered impact of interference on the overall capacity of a multi-hop wireless network. However, each of these papers assumes that the information about link interference is available, but they do not describe how to estimate it. Thus our work on a practical method for estimating link interference helps generate the information taken for granted in previous work.
As we discussed earlier, various heuristics for estimating link interference have been proposed [18,8,12,4]. We have shown that our empirical methodology can provide a more accurate estimation of pairwise link interference.
The knowledge of which links interfere with one another can benefit a number of network operations. For example, it can improve routing algorithms [5,4], help in engineering and managing multi-hop wireless networks [3], and aid in channel assignment [16].
There is a large body of work on measuring various properties of wireless networks. Here we list some of the recent work. Aguayo et al. [1] analyze the causes of packet loss in an outdoor multihop 802.11b network. Yarvis et al [20] use testbeds in three different houses to study the properties of home wireless networks. Gupta et al [7] experimentally study the performance of TCP in a multi-hop wireless network. Our work contributes a practical technique for measuring another key property, viz., wireless interference.