A high-throughput routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol is widely used in wireless ad hoc networks. With OLSR, only one routing path from source to destination is established at a time. However, links of wireless networks are very unreliable, and network topologies might vary rapidly. These features may cause frequent data retransmissions or the route rebuilding. Hence, improving the network throughput becomes a big challenge. This paper designs a new high-throughput routing protocol (HTRP) for wireless sensor networks, which combines the OLSR protocol with opportunistic routing and network coding. Opportunistic routing is able to leverage the wireless channel's characteristic of broadcasting and opportunistically deliver data through multiple routing paths. And OLSR can provide the information about network topologies and other parameters that opportunistic routing needs but cannot gain by itself. We evaluate the performance through both simulation and empirical experiments. The throughput of the HTRP is more than 10× and 2× of the OLSR protocol respectively in simulation and experiments.