Multi-Stream Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Multi-hop wireless networks are becoming a new attractive communication paradigm. Multi-hop wireless networks typically use routing techniques similar to those in wired networks. Routing protocol design is critical to the performance and reliability of wireless networks. These traditional routing protocols choose the best sequence of nodes between the source and destination, and forward each packet through that sequence. They are ineffective when coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. In this paper, we develop a multi-stream opportunistic routing protocol (MSOR). MSOR broadcasts every packet and each packet would be forwarded only once by nodes which received the packet in the forwarder list before. Through more nodes forward each packet, the wireless link is strengthened. In addition, MSOR takes advantage of multiple long but radio lossy links concurrently, resulting in high expected progress per transmission, so the packet delay would decrease remarkably. Our preliminary results show that MSOR is of high efficiency and can effectively support multiple simultaneous flows. Especially in unreliable and unpredictable wireless networks, MSOR has shown better performance than traditional routing protocols such as AODV.