Probabilistic Routing Protocol For Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is one of the new generation wireless communication networks. WMN can be seen as WLAN with special propertie. In spite of the low mobility, WMN is also similar to wireless Ad Hoc network. WMN, consisting of Mesh routers and Mesh clients, is static wireless network which we can say as the wireless Internet. The current WMN routing protocols come from Ad Hoc network routing protocols. These protocols are similar to the routing protocol used in the wired networks.Different from the wired network, the wireless communication media is trustless. And the wireless communication is natural broadcast. The transmission distance and the probability of successful transmission are changed with time. These properties are some of reasons causing the low throughput of wireless networks. Wireless routing protocols should be designed according to these properties to accomplish the purpose of high speed, correctness, high efficience and scalability. This paper presents GPR (Geographic Probabilistic Routing protocol), an opportunistic routing protocol worked between Mesh routers in WMN. In GPR, nodes detect the link condition by probe packets. In order to send a packet, the sender selects a candidate subset. The nodes who successfully received the packet send ACK according to their priority. The result of the simulations can be concluded as:Firstly, the protocol can effectively reduce the duplicated transmission at low cost. In GPR, if there are no ACKs from other candidates, instead of sending ACK immediately, the candidate calculats the transmission-probability based on the probability of successful transmission between the candidates and then broadcast ACK and transmit the packet at this transmission-probability.Secondly, the GPR is the geographic information based probabilistic routing. Since using geographic information reduce the overhead of the nodes used to maintain the link quality of the whole network. This makes GPR more scalable than the topology based protocols.Thirdly, the extensive simulation results show that GPR is promising to achieve higher throughput and better scalability compared to the reference probabilistic routing protocol in the Infrasturcture/Backbone Wireless Mesh Network.In the end of the paper, we conclude the whole research process and propose the further work.