Distance Progress Based Opportunistic Routing for wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) has been proposed to improve the performance of multihop wireless networks by exploiting its broadcast nature. In contrast to traditional routing, where traffic is sent along pre-determined paths, in OR an ordered set of candidates is selected as the next-hop potential forwarders. The candidate selection is a key issue in OR and many algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we define a new metric for candidate selection based on the expected distance progress of sending a packet under OR. By using this metric we propose a hop-by-hop candidate selection and prioritization algorithm that we call Distance Progress Based Opportunistic Routing, DPOR. In contrast to other algorithms, in DPOR each node selects its candidates set independently, without considering the other nodes' candidates sets. DPOR only relies on the neighbors' geographic position of forwarder and the links delivery probability between forwarder and its neighbors. We compare our proposal with four other relevant candidate selection algorithms. Our results show that DPOR performance is almost the same as optimum candidate selection algorithm, while DPOR requires less information and run much faster.