Trading Structure for Randomness in Wireless Opportunistic Routing
Author(s) • • •
Chachulski, Szymon
Jennings, Michael
Katti, Sachin
Katabi, Dina
Advisor(s)
Dina Katabi
Date Issued
February 23, 2007
Series/Report no.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Abstract
Opportunistic routing is a recent technique that achieves high throughput in the face of lossy wireless links. The current opportunistic routing protocol, ExOR, ties the MAC with routing, imposing a strict schedule on routers' access to the medium. Although the scheduler delivers opportunistic gains, it misses some of the inherent features of the 802.11 MAC. For example, it prevents spatial reuse and thus may underutilize the wireless medium. It also eliminates the layering abstraction, making the protocol less amenable to extensions of alternate traffic type such as multicast.This paper presents MORE, a MAC-independent opportunistic routing protocol. MORE randomly mixes packets before forwarding them. This randomness ensures that routers that hear the same transmission do not forward the same packets. Thus, MORE needs no special scheduler to coordinate routers and can run directly on top of 802.11. Experimental results from a 20-node wireless testbed show that MORE's average unicast throughput is 20% higher than ExOR, and the gains rise to 50% over ExOR when there is a chance of spatial reuse. For multicast, MORE's gains increase with the number of destinations, and are 35-200% greater than ExOR.
Subjects
Network Coding
Opportunistic Routing
Wireless Networks
Persistent DSpace Link