Toward reliable data delivery for highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of delivering data packets for highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks in a reliable and timely manner. Most existing ad hoc routing protocols are susceptible to node mobility, especially for large-scale networks. Driven by this issue, we propose an efficient Position-based Opportunistic Routing (POR) protocol which takes advantage of the stateless property of geographic routing and the broadcast nature of wireless medium. When a data packet is sent out, some of the neighbor nodes that have overheard the transmission will serve as forwarding candidates, and take turn to forward the packet if it is not relayed by the specific best forwarder within a certain period of time. By utilizing such in-the-air backup, communication is maintained without being interrupted. The additional latency incurred by local route recovery is greatly reduced and the duplicate relaying caused by packet reroute is also decreased. In the case of communication hole, a Virtual Destination-based Void Handling (VDVH) scheme is further proposed to work together with POR. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that POR achieves excellent performance even under high node mobility with acceptable overhead and the new void handling scheme also works well.