On the performance of time-space opportunistic routing in multihop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In classical routing strategies for multihop mobile wireless networks packets are routed on a pre-defined route usually obtained by a shortest path routing protocol. In opportunistic routing schemes, for each packet and each hop, the next relay is found by dynamically selecting the node that captures the packet transmission and which is the nearest to the destination. Such a scheme allows each packet to take advantage of the local pattern of transmissions and fadings at any slot and at any hop. The aim of this paper is to quantify and optimize the potential performance gains of such opportunistic routing strategies compared with classical routing schemes. The analysis is conducted under the following lower layer assumptions: the Medium Access (MAC) layer is a spatial version of Aloha which has been shown to scale well for large multihop networks; the capture of a packet by some receiver is determined by the Signal over Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) experienced by the receiver. The paper contains a detailed simulation study which shows that such time-space opportunistic schemes very significantly outperform classical routing schemes. It also contains a mathematical study where we show how to optimally tune the MAC parameters so as to minimize the average number of time slots required to carry a typical packet from origin to destination on long paths. We show that this optimization is independent of network density.