PRIOR: Prioritized Forwarding for Opportunistic Routing

Taku YAMAZAKI
Ryo YAMAMOTO
Takumi MIYOSHI
Takuya ASAKA
Yoshiaki TANAKA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E100-B    No.1    pp.28-41
Publication Date: 2017/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2016CQP0008
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Challenged Networking Technologies and Its Service Quality)
Category: Network
Keyword: 
ad hoc network,  opportunistic routing,  forwarder selection,  retransmission control,  

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Summary: 
In ad hoc networks, broadcast forwarding protocols called OR (opportunistic routing) have been proposed to gain path diversity for higher packet delivery rates and shorter end-to-end delays. In general backoff-based OR protocols, each receiver autonomously makes a forwarding decision by using certain metrics to determine if a random backoff time is to be applied. However, each forwarder candidate must wait for the expiration of the backoff timer before forwarding a packet. Moreover, they cannot gain path diversity if the forwarding path includes local sparse areas, and this degrades performance as it strongly depends on the terminal density. In this paper, we propose a novel OR protocol called PRIOR (prioritized forwarding for opportunistic routing). In PRIOR, a terminal, called a prioritized forwarder and which forwards packets without using a backoff time, is selected from among the neighbours. In addition, PRIOR uses lightweight hop-by-hop retransmission control to mitigate the effect of terminal density. Moreover, we introduce an enhancement to PRIOR to reduce unnecessary forwarding by using an explicit acknowledgement. We evaluate PRIOR in comparison with conventional protocols in computer simulations.