HOF: Hybrid Opportunistic Forwarding for Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper describes HOF, a hybrid opportunistic forwarding protocol for multi-hop wireless mesh networks. It combines the concept of traditional "best" path routing, with the concept of opportunistic routing, which explores and determines the next hop relay node at each hops. Some common problems of existing opportunistic routing protocols are studied in this paper. HOF can largely solve such problems by using the most preferred node (MPN) and weighted-Sift techniques, proposed in this paper. The HOF scheme is efficient, robust against channel or node failures and incurs little network overhead. The performance of HOF is compared with OSPF and GeRaF. Results show that, HOF performs almost as well as OSPF and better than GeRaF under a perfect environment. When more node and channel failures happen, it outperforms both of them.