FSA: A Fast Coordination Scheme for Opportunistic Routing

Opportunistic Routing (OR) has been considered as one promising technique to overcome the unreliability of the wireless medium by collaborating multiple neighboring receivers/candidates for packet forwarding. A key challenge in OR is how to efficiently coordinate the multiple candidates and ensure only one of them to forward the packet. In this paper, we investigate the existing candidate coordination schemes and propose a "fast slotted acknowledgment" (FSA) to further improve the performance of OR by using single ACK with the help of channel sensing technique. The simulation results show that FSA can reduce the average end-to-end time delay of OR protocols by up to 50% compared with state-of-the-art coordination schemes in light traffic scenarios and can increase the average end-to-end throughput by up to 20% in heavy traffic scenarios.