Node Load Balance Multi-flow Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract: Opportunistic routing (OR) has been proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks by exploiting the multi-user diversity and broadcast nature of the wireless medium. It involves multiple candidate forwarders to relay packets every hop. The existing OR doesn’t take account of the traffic load and load balance, therefore some nodes may be overloaded while the others may not, leading to network performance decline. In this paper, we focus on opportunities routing selection with node load balance which is described as a convex optimization problem. To solve the problem, by combining primal-dual and sub-gradient methods, a fully distributed Node load balance Multi-flow Opportunistic Routing algorithm (NMOR) is proposed. With node load balance constraint, NMOR allocates the flow rate iteratively and the rate allocation decides the candidate forwarder selection of opportunities routing. The simulation results show that NMOR algorithm improves 100 %, 62 % of the aggregative throughput than ETX and EAX, respectively. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L