PIXOR – A Pipelined Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

In the recent years, opportunistic routing has shown a great potential as an efficient routing method in wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce PIXOR which intelligently uses broadcast advantage of wireless media to create a pipelined, simple to implement and efficient routing method for wireless mesh networks. PIXOR replaces the end-to-end acknowledgement mechanism of ExOR by a simple hop-by-hop gossip scheme. It divides the network into several partitions. Each partition contains several forwarding nodes and acts as a distributed sender for next partition and a distributed receiver for previous partition. Each partition is responsible for delivering the data to next hop (partition), and providing gossip ACKs for previous hop (partition) in a pipelined manner. We have evaluated the performance of PIXOR using OMNET++ network simulator. Our results indicate that PIXOR outperforms ExOR in terms of data delivery delay and overall throughput.