CORMAN: A Novel Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The link quality variation of wireless channels has been a challenging issue in data communications until recent explicit exploration in utilizing this characteristic. The same broadcast transmission may be perceived significantly differently, and usually independently, by receivers at different geographic locations. Furthermore, even the same stationary receiver may experience drastic link quality fluctuation over time. The combination of link-quality variation with the broadcasting nature of wireless channels has revealed a direction in the research of wireless networking, namely, cooperative communication. Research on cooperative communication started to attract interests in the community at the physical layer but more recently its importance and usability have also been realized at upper layers of the network protocol stack. In this article, we tackle the problem of opportunistic data transfer in mobile ad hoc networks. Our solution is called Cooperative Opportunistic Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (CORMAN). It is a pure network layer scheme that can be built atop off-the-shelf wireless networking equipment. Nodes in the network use a lightweight proactive source routing protocol to determine a list of intermediate nodes that the data packets should follow en route to the destination. Here, when a data packet is broadcast by an upstream node and has happened to be received by a downstream node further along the route, it continues its way from there and thus will arrive at the destination node sooner. This is achieved through cooperative data communication at the link and network layers. This work is a powerful extension to the pioneering work of ExOR. We test CORMAN and compare it to AODV, and observe significant performance improvement in varying mobile settings.