Let the Tree Bloom: Scalable Opportunistic Routing with ORPL

Routing in battery-operated wireless networks is challenging, posing a tradeoff between energy and latency. Previous work has shown that opportunistic routing can achieve low-latency data collection in duty-cycled networks. However, applications are now considered where nodes are not only periodic data sources, but rather addressable end points generating traffic with arbitrary patterns. We present ORPL, an opportunistic routing protocol that supports any-to-any, on-demand traffic. ORPL builds upon RPL, the standard protocol for low-power IPv6 networks. By combining RPL's tree-like topology with opportunistic routing, ORPL forwards data to any destination based on the mere knowledge of the nodes' sub-tree. We use bitmaps and Bloom filters to represent and propagate this information in a space-efficient way, making ORPL scale to large networks of addressable nodes. Our results in a 135-node testbed show that ORPL outperforms a number of state-of-the-art solutions including RPL and CTP, conciliating a sub-second latency and a sub-percent duty cycle. ORPL also increases robustness and scalability, addressing the whole network reliably through a 64-byte Bloom filter, where RPL needs kilobytes of routing tables for the same task

A Light-Weight Opportunistic Forwarding Protocol with Optimized Preamble Length for Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensed information is expected to be reliably and timely delivered to a sink in an ad-hoc way. However, it is challenging to achieve this goal because of the highly dynamic topology induced from asynchronous duty cycles and temporally and spatially varying link quality among nodes. Currently some opportunistic forwarding protocols have been proposed to address the challenge. However, they involve complicated mechanisms to determine the best forwarder at each hop, which incurs heavy overheads for the resource-constrained nodes. In this paper, we propose a light-weight opportunistic forwarding (LWOF) scheme. Different from other recently proposed opportunistic forwarding schemes, LWOF employs neither historical network information nor a contention process to select a forwarder prior to data transmissions. It confines forwarding candidates to an optimized area, and takes advantage of the preamble in low-power-listening (LPL) MAC protocols and dual-channel communication to forward a packet to a unique downstream node towards the sink with a high probability, without making a forwarding decision prior to data transmission. Under LWOF, we optimize LPL MAC protocol to have a shortened preamble (LWMAC), based on a theoretical analysis on the relationship among preamble length, delivery probability at each hop, node density and sleep duration. Simulation results show that LWOF, along with LWMAC, can achieve relatively good performance in terms of delivery reliability and latency, as a receiver-based opportunistic forwarding protocol, while reducing energy consumption per packet by at least twice

RECOMAC: a cross-layer cooperative network protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

A novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative protocol, namely, Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) is proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. The protocol architecture makes use of cooperative forwarding methods, in which coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, as RECOMAC spans the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers. Randomized coding is exploited at the physical layer to realize cooperative transmissions, and cooperative forwarding is implemented for routing functionality, which is submerged into the MAC layer, while the overhead for MAC and route set up is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements of eight times higher throughput and one tenth of end-to-end delay than that of the conventional architecture in practical wireless mesh networks

A cross layer multi hop network architecture for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is presented. Our architecture involves the design of a simple yet efficient cooperative flooding scheme,two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms as well as the design of Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that spans and incorporates the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers for improving the performance of multihop communication. The proposed architecture exploits randomized coding at the physical layer to realize cooperative diversity. Randomized coding alleviates relay selection and actuation mechanisms,and therefore reduces the coordination among the relays. The coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, without communication among the relays and without establishing a prior route. In our architecture, routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements, such as eight times higher throughput and ten times lower end-to-end delay as well as reduced overhead, as compared to networks based on well-known IEEE 802.11 and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols