An efficient routing protocol to increase the communication reliability of multi-hop cellular networks

Reliable routing is important to the reliable communication between end users in wireless networks. However, the infrastructure wireless networks and ad-hoc wireless networks suffer from channel congestion in routings, failing to guarantee high transmission reliability. Multi-hop cellular networks integrating the two type of networks increase the communication reliability by combining the infrastructure routing protocol and multi-hop protocol, but are still prone to congestion at the mobile gateway nodes. This paper presents an Efficient Routing Protocol (ERP) to increase the communication reliability of multi-hop cellular networks. This routing protocol chooses a node with higher channel capacity to forward data to a base station, and the routing path length is adaptive to the channel condition of the forwarding nodes. When a nodepsilas channel quality to a base station is not sufficiently high or the buffer size of the node is almost filled in, it chooses a relay node with higher capacity to forward the data to a base station. Thus, the routing protocol guarantees that a message is reliably transmitted to a base station. Simulation results show the superiority of the ERP in comparison with other routing scheme in terms of scalability, throughput and overhead.