Robust on-demand routing mechanism for wireless multi-hop networks

All traditional on-demand routing protocols for wireless networks perform well if routing is provided with few optimised fixed routes before transmissions, and each hop uses a fixed neighbour for forwarding a packet. This strategy, however, cannot be adopted effectively in practical dynamic environments with frequent transmission failures. By taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless media the authors propose a novel opportunistic routing scheme to overcome the drawbacks of wireless transmission called 'network layer broadcast with confirmed opportunity routing' (NBC-OPP). NBC-OPP features a forwarding list built between source and destination upon the route request and route reply messages. Using the simulation of various network scenarios the authors have demonstrated the superior performance of this new method over traditional deterministic routing schemes for packet delivery, end-to-end delay and route control message load, especially for large node density, bad channel state and low traffic rate conditions.