Route selection for opportunistic routing in multi-channel scenario

Opportunistic routing (OR) is a promising concept to improve throughput and reliability by utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. Previous studies focus on OR with single channel scenario; however, multi-channel is widely used over wireless communication systems. Due to the overhearing and dynamic forwarding aspects, OR obtains worse throughput gain for additional channels. This paper attempts to improve OR in multi-channel scenario and eases flow bottleneck by proposing a new metric Expected Anypath Delay (EAD) and a heuristic method to find routes for OR in multi-channel scenario. By including transmission time and waiting time, EAD considers both network resource consumption and intra-flow interference of OR. Simulation results demonstrate that OR with EAD advances 20%-30% throughput improvement and 15%-25% end-to-end delay reduction in multi-channel scenario.