ROMER: Resilient Opportunistic Mesh Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks hold promises to provide robust and high-throughput data delivery to wireless users. In a mesh network, high-speed Access Points (HAPs), equipped with advanced antennas, communicate with each other over wireless channels and form an indoor/outdoor broadband backhaul. This backbone efficiently forwards user traffic to a few gateway APs (GAPs), which additionally have high-speed connections to the wired Internet. In this paper, we describe ROMER, a resilient and opportunistic routing solution for mesh networks. ROMER balances between long-term route stability and shortterm opportunistic performance. It builds a runtime, forwarding mesh on a per-packet basis that offers a set of candidate routes. The actual forwarding path by each packet opportunistically adapts to the dynamic channel condition and exploits the highestrate wireless channels at the time. To improve resilience against lossy links, HAP failures or HAPs under DoS attacks, ROMER delivers redundant data copies in a controlled and randomized manner over the candidate forwarding mesh. We evaluate the effectiveness of ROMER through both simulations and analysis.