Opportunistic routing in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

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.