Opportunistic Frame Forwarding in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic routing has been shown to achieve the high throughput of the wireless mesh network with lossy channels. Different from deterministic routing mechanisms in which a frame is <em>transmitted</em> and forwarded along with a fixed and predetermined <em>path</em>, the opportunistic routing technique allows multiple nodes hearing the frame to form the forwarder set containing promising candidates for the frame forwarding. Existing opportunistic routing protocols typically choose among forwarding candidates based on the decision made from the transmitter disregarding the current loads in candidates. In this paper, the opportunistic frame forwarding mechanism with considering backlog of frames among forwarders is proposed and analyzed. Specifically, in addition to take into account the delivery probability, our proposal restricts members of the forwarder set for a given transmitter to those wireless nodes whose transmission range covers one another and makes the true forwarder picked from the forward set of a given transmitting frame being the one who gains access to wireless channel for the frame before others do. Therefore, the efficient and load-balanced opportunistic routing for wireless mesh networks can be achieved. Analytic results show that the proposed method compared to the deterministic routing methodology can achieve the high frame delivery ratio.