Location-Aided Opportunistic Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks consist of mobile nodes which have no fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. Routing protocol design is critical to the performance and reliability of mobile ad hoc networks. Traditional routing protocols have been shown ineffective in coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a location-aided opportunistic routing protocol (LAOR). LAOR uses nodes´ location information to define the forwarding candidate set and to prioritize candidates. The priority of nodes in forwarding candidate set is defined by their distances to destination node, the nearer to destination node, the higher priority. Moreover, LAOR minimizes resource consumption and duplicate transmissions by judiciously selecting forwarding nodes to prevent routes from diverging. To further protect against packet losses, LAOR uses local recovery to retransmit a packet when an ACK is not received within a specified time. In the end, we validate LAOR using NS-2 simulations.