Opportunistic routing in wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) has been proposed as a way to increase the performance of wireless networks by exploiting its broadcast nature. In OR, instead of pre-selecting a single specific node to be the next-hop as a forwarder for a packet, multiple nodes can potentially be selected as the next-hop forwarder. Thus the source can use multiple potential paths to deliver the packets to the destination. More specially, when the current node transmits a packet, all the candidates that receive the packet successfully will coordinate with each other to determine which one would actually forward the packet according to some criteria, while the other nodes will simply discard the packet. In this chapter, we survey the state of the art in OR, then focus on the candidates selection algorithms and carry out a comparative performance evaluation of the most relevant proposals appeared in the literature.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

On the Capacity of Hybrid Wireless Networks with Opportunistic Routing

This paper studies the capacity of hybrid wireless networks with opportunistic routing (OR). We first extend the opportunistic routing algorithm to exploit high-speed data transmissions in infrastructure network through base stations. We then develop linear programming models to calculate the end-to-end throughput bounds from multiple source nodes to single as well as multiple destination nodes. The developed models are applied to study several hybrid wireless network examples. Through case studies, we investigate several factors that have significant impacts on the hybrid wireless network capacity under opportunistic routing, such as node transmission range, density and distribution pattern of base stations (BTs), and number of wireless channels on wireless nodes and base stations. Our numerical results demonstrate that opportunistic routing could achieve much higher throughput on both ad hoc and hybrid networks than traditional unicast routing (UR). Moreover, opportunistic routing can efficiently utilize base stations and achieve significantly higher throughput gains in hybrid wireless networks than in pure ad hoc networks especially with multiple-channel base stations