An efficient heuristic candidate selection algorithm for Opportunistic Routing in wireless multihop networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) is a new class of routing protocols that selects the next-hop forwarder on-the-fly. It takes advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. By selecting a set of candidates for the purpose of forwarding the packet toward the destination, OR improves the reliability of wireless transmissions. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic and a quick candidate selection algorithm based on the link delivery probability from one node to a candidate node. We shall refer to it as Heuristic Candidate selection algorithm based on Optimum delivery Probability (HU-COP). HU-COP finds candidates through links that offer delivery probabilities that are close to optimum. We compare HU-COP with the two other well-known candidate selection algorithms proposed in the literature. The numerical results in terms of the expected number of transmissions show that HU-COP outperforms the well-known ExOR. In addition, the performance of HU-COP is very close to the results of the most efficient algorithm in various scenarios. Furthermore, HU-COP identifies the sets of candidates much faster than the other algorithms under study.