## 5 Experimental Results
### Comparison of Original Hop Penalty and Split Hop Penalty  
To better understand the differences in performance for the proposed scheme, it is better to average out all the results with different transmit powers and present them against the increasing number of nodes. Though including 0 dBm is not recommended, it is also kept to show unbiased results to help cover all possible transmission powers.  
Figure 14 shows a brief comparison of the latency or delay incurred throughout the experiment, accumulating all the transmit power presented in the previous section. Except for when the number of nodes is 2 and 10, the performance gain is visible in the graph, adapting the newly suggested split hop penalty. The most noticeable difference is when the number of nodes is maximum, e.g., 14 with a difference of 12.05 ms, while the least  
Figure 12: UPD average throughput for (**a**) original hop penalty and (**b**) split hop penalty.  
Figure 13: UDP jitter for (**a**) original hop penalty and (**b**) split hop penalty.  
performance difference is 0.9 ms improvement over the original hop penalty. However, there are some instances where the newly adapted scheme has subpar performance, as recorded to be \(-1.16\) ms and \(-2.41\) ms difference (greater than the original hop penalty).  
Since throughput is an important factor, to highlight all the differences clearly, it is plotted against Figure 15a on a linear scale and Figure 15b logarithmic scale. The linear scale shows a massive improvement when the number of nodes is low and throughput is maximum. As the number of nodes starts increasing, the average throughput keeps becoming smaller due to the massive number of broadcasts in the network, and more OGM packets are re-transmitted and consume overall bandwidth. The improvement trend as compared to the original hop penalty continues if we start increasing the number of nodes, which may not be clear in Figure 15a, but is very much visible in the logarithmic scale presented in Figure 15b. As mentioned previously, the average improvement by employing the split hop penalty is found to be 21 times that offered by the original scheme.  
Packet loss percentage as compared with a varying number of nodes is presented in Figure 16. As presented in Section 4.1, the graph presented can be seen as a two-part difference, where split hop penalty provides lesser packet losses as compared to the original, while as the number of nodes increases the performance of split hop penalty drops below the original base-line provided by the default hop penalty. This parameter is considered the only con of the newly proposed scheme; therefore, caution is advised in implementing a split hop penalty on networks with a large number of nodes. However, further investigation might help in this regard.  
Figure 14: Comparison of average end-to-end delay (**a**) values and (**b**) difference.  
Figure 15: Comparison of average throughput with (**a**) linear scale and (**b**) logarithmic scale.  
Figure 17 shows the performance improvement in the jitter as plotted with averages over all transmit powers. Most of the time, the jitter is less than the original hop penalty.  
The only two instances where the jitter is very slightly higher than the original scheme are where the number of nodes is 2 or 10, which also justifies the higher delays at the same number of nodes in Figure 10. The overall improvement in jitter counting all the number of nodes (where jitter is slightly higher than the original) was found to be 50.1 ms on average, while the highest difference or performance gain was recorded for 14 nodes where the jitter was 87.57 ms less as compared to original hop penalty.