Multihop Wireless Networks: Opportunistic Routing

1.3 Routing Techniques in MWNs

The routing protocols in MWNs can be classified into different categories using different criteria. For example, they can be classified into link-state routing (e.g. OLSR—Jacquet et al. 2001) and distance-vector routing (e.g. AODV—Perkins and Royer 2001). They can also be categorized as proactive (e.g. DSDV—Perkins and Bhagwat 1994) and reactive (on-demand) (e.g. DSR—Johnson et al. 2001—and TORA—Park and Corson 1997) routing. For a better understanding of the difference between opportunistic routing and other state-of-the-art routing protocols in MWNs, we would like to classify the routing protocols as traditional and opportunistic routing.

1.3.1 Traditional Routing

Traditional routing protocols (Johnson et al. 2001; Perkins and Bhagwat 2001; Perkins and Royer 2001) for multihop wireless networks have followed the concept of routing in wired networks by abstracting the wireless links as wired links, and finding the shortest, least cost, or highest throughput path(s) between a source and destination. Most routing protocols rely on the consistent and stable behavior of individual links, so the intermittent behavior of wireless links can result in poor performance such as low packet delivery ratio and high control overhead. On the other hand, this abstraction ignores the unique broadcast nature and spacial diversity of the wireless medium. We introduce several well known traditional routing protocols in MWNs as follows.

AODV

The Ad hoc On Demand Distance ...