Survey on diversity-based routing in wireless mesh networks: Challenges and solutions

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWireless multi-hop networks often experience severe performance degradations when legacy routing algorithms are employed, because they are not optimized to take advantage of the peculiarities of wireless links. Indeed, the wireless channel is intrinsically a broadcast medium, making a point-to-point link abstraction not suitable. Furthermore, channel conditions may significantly differ both in time and space, making routing over predetermined paths inadequate to adapt the forwarding process to the channel variability. Motivated by these limitations, the research community has started to explore novel routing paradigms and design principles dealing with the wireless diversity as an opportunity rather than a shortcoming. Within this large body of research, opportunistic routing and network coding are emerging as two of the most promising approaches to exploit the intrinsic characteristics of multi-hop wireless networks, such as multi-user diversity. The aim of this survey is to examine how opportunistic forwarding and network coding can achieve performance gains by performing hop-by-hop route construction and by encoding data packets at intermediate nodes. To this end, we present a taxonomy of existing solutions, and we describe their most representative features, benefits and design challenges. We also discuss open issues in this research area, with a special attention to the ones most related to wireless mesh networks.

LR3: Link Reliable Reactive Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Geographic routing with opportunistic routing have attracted research community in recent years. It uses the broadcasting nature of wireless networks to forward data packets to the destination nodes [22] [23]. Opportunistic routing extends the idea of geographic routing [24], where the routing layer identifies a set of candidates forwarders and passes this set to the MAC layer.…”

Multicast delivery using opportunistic routing in wireless mesh networks

“…All the candidates listen to all ACKs before deciding whether to forward the data packet. Other approaches combine OR with network coding, providing an elegant method for candidate coordination [48,49,50,51]. However, using network coding with OR may lead to a high number of potential forwarders sending coded packets, and thus, resulting in redundant transmissions.…”

“…However, using network coding with OR may lead to a high number of potential forwarders sending coded packets, and thus, resulting in redundant transmissions. There exists a tradeoff between transmitting a sufficient number of coded packets to guarantee that the destination has enough coded packets to reconstruct the native packets, and avoiding to inject in the network unnecessary packets [49].…”

Optimum node placement in wireless opportunistic routing networks

“…Combining the idea of OR with Network Coding (NC) [34] can provide an elegant method for preventing duplicate transmissions without coordinating the candidates by coding the packets [35,36,37]. MAC-independent Opportunistic Routing & Encoding (MORE) [35] was proposed by Chachulski et al The data flow is divided in some batches which contain a certain amount of packets.…”