| Abstract |
Multi-hop wireless networks, such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and wireless mesh networks (WMNs), have been increasingly popular due to their easy deployment at low cost and their broad applications, ranging from last-mile network access to environment monitoring and vehicular networks.
Routing in multi-hop wireless networks poses a great challenge mainly due to the existence of unreliable wireless links and interference among concurrent transmissions. Due to these unique characteristics, traditional routing schemes that select the best path towards a destination and forward the packet to a specific next hop, have proven ill-suited for wireless networks with lossy broadcast links. Recently, a new routing paradigm, opportunistic routing, is proposed to cope with unreliable transmissions by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the wireless medium.
However, existing opportunistic protocols can be characterized by lack of concrete understanding of the way design affects the performance of an opportunistic routing scheme and to which extent the latter is owed to its opportunistic elements, or to other features that can also be applied to traditional routing, such as acknowledgment schemes.
In order to study how these primitives affect an opportunistic routing scheme and to facilitate my own scheme design I developed a framework, in which, using simulation, I was provided with the required insight for the design of a new adaptive opportunistic forwarding scheme.
Moreover, the suggested scheme is compared to the opportunistic elements of two distinguished opportunistic routing protocols, SOAR and Directed Transmission, under varying channel error and misinformation conditions, outperforming both in terms of delay and resource consumption. Finally, the suggested procedure is extended to support the existence of multiple flows in a network, which is confirmed by simulations.
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A framework for opportunistic routing in wireless multi-hop networks
