MaxOPP: A novel Opportunistic Routing for wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic Routing is emerging as a promising paradigm to mitigate performance degradation in wireless multi-hop networks due to lossy links and varying channel conditions. Opportunistic routing protocols exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium to perform hop-by-hop route construction, and to take advantage of path diversity. However, most of the existing solutions impose a-priori constraints on the set of candidate forwarders that can be used when routing a packet. In this paper, we describe MaxOPP, a flexible and adaptive opportunistic routing algorithm able to select at each hop, and at run-time, the candidate forwarders that can maximize the opportunistic throughput gain. Thus, forwarding decisions in MaxOPP are dynamically adapted to variations of network conditions, ensuring an efficient trade-off between reliability and opportunistic benefit. Simulations conducted with NS-2 on a set of representative scenarios show that MaxOPP achieves higher throughput for bulk data transfers than traditional shortest-path routing.