Multipath-based Opportunistic Routing Scheme for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Network

Opportunistic routing (OR) has been emerged as a promising routing strategy to improve transmission reliability for wireless networks. By taking broadcast nature of wireless medium, a set of forwarding candidate nodes receive a data packet simultaneously, so one of them can relay it unless they all fail to receive. This strategy can dramatically improve one-hop reliability even in unreliable wireless links, however, it cannot be directly applied into large-scale wireless multi-hop networks since multi hop communication significantly decreases end-to-end reliability. In this letter, we propose a novel opportunistic routing scheme for large-scale wireless multi-hop networks, which adopts multipath based routing in order to improve end-to-end reliability. While taking advantages of opportunistic routing, each intermediate node can determine whether it branches into multiple paths or not without any network topology information, so that a desired delivery ratio from a source to a destination given by application demands can be achieved in a fully localized manner.