Practical opportunistic routing in high-speed multi-rate wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) has been proven effective for wireless mesh networks. However, the existing OR protocols cannot meet all the requirements for high-speed, multi-rate wireless mesh networks, including: running on commodity Wi-Fi interface, supporting TCP, low complexity, supporting multiple link layer data rates, and exploiting partial packets. In this paper, we propose Practical Opportunistic Routing (POR), a new OR protocol that meets all above requirements. The key features of POR include: packet forwarding based on a per-packet feedback mechanism, block-based partial packet recovery, multi-hop link rate adaptation, and a novel path cost calculation which enables good path selection by considering the ability of nodes to select appropriate data rates to match the channel conditions. We implement POR within the Click modular router and our experiments in a 16-node wireless testbed confirm that POR achieves significantly better performance than the compared protocols for both UDP and TCP traffic.