Enhancing Opportunistic Routing for Dynamic Environments

Routing in MANETs is challenging due to the time-variance of the communication channel. The reliability of the end-to-end link in such channels is improved with Opportunistic Routing (OpR) protocols, which endeavor the broadcasting nature of wireless channels using several nondisjoint propagation paths for the same traffic flow. Network coding is used together with OpR to provide multi-path coding redundancy. This combination allows to achieve optimal throughput in stationary wireless channels for mesh technologies with contention-based channel access. This paper focuses on the end-to-end throughput stability in time-variant channels. It proposes enhancements to OpR that achieve stable throughput in case of edge failures due to nodes mobility. Traces from real channel measurements are used in the evaluations. The resultant throughput is much more stable in comparison to the state-of-the-art OpR protocols.