DSMA: Optimal multirate anypath routing in wireless networks with directional antennas

Anypath routing can improve the end-to-end throughput by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication media in wireless networks. Although anypath routing has been extensively studied in recent years, the problem of anypath routing in wireless networks with directional antennas has not been fully investigated. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the joint problem of antenna direction scheduling and transmission rate selection for anypath routing in wireless networks with directional antennas. In this paper, we present a Directional antenna based Shortest Multirate Anypath routing algorithm (DSMA), which is proven to compute the optimal anypath routing strategy. We integrate our algorithm with a well-known opportunistic routing protocol MORE, and extensively evaluate its performance. Our evaluation results show that our algorithm can achieve at least 34.0% higher end-to-end throughput, in the median case; and at least 29.9% shorter mean end-to-end packet delay, than the single-rate anypath routing protocol.