Link correlation aware opportunistic routing

By exploiting reception diversity of wireless network links, researchers have shown that opportunistic routing can improve network performance significantly over traditional routing schemes. However, recently empirical studies indicate that we are too optimistic, i.e. diversity gain can be overestimated if we continue to assume that packet receptions of wireless links are independent events. For the first time, this paper formally analyzes the opportunistic routing gain under the presence of link correlation considering the loss of DATA and ACK packets. Based on the model, we introduce a new link-correlation-aware opportunistic routing scheme, which improves the performance by exploiting the diverse uncorrelated forwarding links. Our design is evaluated using simulation where we show (i) link correlation leads to less diversity gain, (ii) and with our link-correlation-aware design; improvement can be gained. We also provide a unique model to generate strings of randomly correlated receptions.