Buffer occupancy and link state opportunistic routing for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Providing a high level of Quality of Service is essential for future wireless networks. This article presents a new multihop wireless routing protocol that opportunistically takes profit from variations of radio conditions in terms of path loss, shadowing and multipath fading to maximize the system capacity. However, guaranteeing high system capacity should not evade the packet delay minimization objective. Consequently, the best path should not only be considered as the path with best throughput but a combination of a good link throughput and, in addition, low router buffer occupancy load. Taking into account the available router buffer occupancy in its path selection, our proposal uses queuing theory information in order to also provide an efficient load balancing solution that adequately distributes the traffic load in the whole network. Exploiting this information, our solution dynamically adapts the selected path across time avoiding overexploited efficient links as well as low throughput link usage. This adaptation is performed considering each link state and the amount of channel information available. This improves the throughput and delay with only small marginal overhead cost. Our proposal applies to all wireless multihop networks, with increased benefit for extending cell coverage. We demonstrate through our simulation study that our solution raises the system capacity by more than 50% in several scenarii as well as reduces packet delays compared to state-of-the-art protocols such as Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector, Optimized Link State Routing and Link State Opportunistic Routing.