Time-Space Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Algorithms and Performance

Abstract : In classical routing strategies for wireless ad-hoc (mobile or mesh) networks packets are transmitted on a pre-defined route that is usually obtained by a shortest path routing protocol. In this paper we review some recent ideas concerning a new routing technique which is opportunistic in the sense that each packet at each hop on its (specific) route from an origin to a destination takes advantage of the actual pattern of nodes that captured its recent (re)transmission in order to choose the next relay. The paper focuses both on the distributed algorithms allowing such a routing technique to work and on the evaluation of the gain in performance it brings compared to classical mechanisms. On the algorithmic side, we show that it is possible to implement this opportunistic technique in such a way that the current transmitter of a given packet does not need to know its next relay a priori, but the nodes that capture this transmission (if any) perform a self selection procedure to chose the packet relay node and acknowledge the transmitter. We also show that this routing technique works well with various medium access protocols (such as Aloha, CSMA, TDMA). Finally, we show that the above relay self selection procedure can be optimized in the sense that it is the node that optimizes some given utility criterion (e.g. minimize the remaining distance to the final destination) which is chosen as the relay. The performance evaluation part is based on stochastic geometry and combines simulation a analytical models. The main result is that such opportunistic schemes very significantly outperform classical routing schemes when properly optimized and provided at least a small number of nodes in the network know their geographical positions exactly.