An Opportunistic Routing Protocol Based on Link Correlation for Wireless Mesh Networks

Opportunistic routing protocol is a wireless multi-hop routing protocol proposed for the broadcast and lossy characteristics existed in wireless networks. In the applications of opportunistic routing, each forwarder is selected by competition in multiple candidates which will result in better transmission reliability compared to the traditional fixed routing. This paper proposes a novel opportunistic routing protocol named link correlated opportunistic routing (LCOR) which considers the link correlation for the selection of candidate forwarders in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). We implement LCOR in simulation scenarios of 30 nodes wireless mesh network. The results show that (i) LCOR can achieve opportunistic routing in WMNs whose nodes are limited and evenly distributed. (ii) LCOR can own higher packet delivery rate compared to link-correlation-unaware opportunistic routing and Shortest Path routing protocol. (iii) The overhead of our protocol is smaller than ExOR when the number of candidates in each forwarding candidates set is less than 5.