Opportunistic Multipath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper investigates combining opportunistic routing techniques with multipath routing for achieving reliability and timeliness in fast-changing network conditions. We present two approaches, WIMOP and DOMR, based on source routing and distributed routing, respectively. Instead of using broadcast packets as in most opportunistic routing work, we use unicast with promiscuous listening so that the reliability at each hop can be increased through retransmissions, while maintaining the broadcasting property required by opportunistic routing. We evaluate our work in NS2 against single path routing and MORE. Our results show that using the same amount of redundant data, our approaches were able to achieve better reliability than MORE. In addition, DOMR also has the advantage over WIMOP that it requires significantly less computational time.