Simple opportunistic routing protocol for wireless mesh networks

• Published in: 2006 2nd IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks pp. 48 - 54
• Main Authors: Rozner, Eric, Seshadri, Jayesh, Mehta, Yogtta, Qiu, Lili
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Cities and towns; Mesh networks; Protection; Relays; Routing protocols; Spread spectrum communication; Telecommunication network reliability; Telecommunication traffic; Throughput; Wireless mesh networks
• ISBN: 9781424407323; 142440732X
• DOI: 10.1109/WIMESH.2006.288602

Multihop wireless mesh networks are becoming a new attractive communication paradigm. Many cities and public places have deployed or are planning to deploy mesh networks to provide Internet access to residents and local businesses. Routing protocol design is critical to the performance and reliability of wireless mesh networks. Traditional routing protocols send traffic along pre-determined paths and have been shown ineffective in coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. In this paper, we develop a simple opportunistic adaptive routing protocol (SOAR) for wireless mesh networks. SOAR maximizes the progress each packet makes by using priority-based timers to ensure that the most preferred node forwards the packet with little coordination overhead. Moreover, SOAR minimizes resource consumption and duplicate transmissions by judiciously selecting forwarding nodes to prevent routes from diverging. To further protect against packet losses, SOAR uses local recovery to retransmit a packet when an ACK is not received within a specified time. SOAR uses a combination of selective ACKs, piggyback ACKs, and ACK compression to protect against ACK loss while minimizing ACK overhead. We evaluate SOAR using NS-2 simulations. Our preliminary results show that SOAR is promising to achieve high efficiency and effectively support multiple simultaneous flows.