Simple Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks are becoming a new attractive communication paradigm. Many cities and public places have deployed or are planning to deploy mesh networks to provide Internet access to residents and local businesses. Routing protocol design is critical to the performance and reliability of wireless mesh networks. Traditional routing protocols send traffic along pre-determined paths and have been shown ineffective in coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. In this paper, the authors develop a Simple Opportunistic Adaptive Routing protocol (SOAR) for wireless mesh networks. SOAR maximizes the progress each packet makes by using priority-based timers to ensure that the most preferred node forwards the packet with little coordination overhead.