Combining opportunistic routing with dynamic source routing for wireless mesh networks

Routing in wireless mesh networks presents a great challenge due to unreliable wireless links and collisions. Recently, a new routing method, opportunistic routing (OR), is proposed to deal with them by exploiting broadcast nature of wireless networks. OR relies on the global knowledge of networks to select relays and determine priorities. In this paper, we propose a new routing scheme, OxDSR, which combines OR and dynamic source routing (DSR) and performs opportunistic transmissions with the help of the local information and the traditional route obtained by DSR. By taking the duplicates and additional wireless resource consumed by multiple ACK frames into consideration, we propose a new metric, equivalent data rate, to select and prioritize relays. Extensive simulation study shows that the proposed OxDSR is more resilient and achieves higher throughput than DSR based on the expected transmission count routing metric.