A hierarchical opportunistic routing with stability information for mobile ad hoc networks

In ad hoc networks, terminals form a network with decentralized and self-organizing manners. Although this can surely extend its potentials, it also suffers from unstable and unreliable communication environments. As concerns this, a broadcast-based routing protocol called opportunistic routing (OR) has been proposed. ORs do not establish any specific route from a source terminal to a destination terminal unlike conventional unicast routing protocols. This characteristic contributes to obtain path diversity and improves end-to-end reliability with multiple forwarding paths. However, the metrics to select appropriate forwarders to a destination terminal greatly affect its performance and grasp of comprehensive terminal status still remains as an issue to be discussed. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical opportunistic routing with stability information of terminals to enable more efficient and reliable forwarding in ad hoc networks to address the issue. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional protocols.