Patent ID: 7936704

Claim:
A method of configuring the topology of a communication network of mesh network type comprising a plurality of nodes (i,j, . . . , N), said communication network being organized as a forest structure comprising trees and subtrees, at least one node i maintaining a periodic timer and an expiration of said timer of said node i triggering the steps of: searching, by said node i, a parent node; selecting, by said node i, the parent node using at least throughput and subtree size as selection criteria; wherein an expiration of said timer of said node i also triggers the step of: migrating said node i to the selected parent node along with its subtree size and, the step of selecting the parent node by said node i is performed by using a routing metric referred to as the Expected Throughput ETP defined as: 1 ETP l i = 1 P l i · ∑ j ∈ ℳ ⁢ 1 { l i ⁢ Δ ⁢ ⁢ l j } R l j ( 1 ) M being the set of nodes, the indicator function 1 {l i Δl j } being one if links l i and l j contend with each other and zero otherwise P l i being the probability that a packet transmission on link l i is successful and R l j being the nominal bit rate of link l j .