Opportunistic Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks: Capacity, Energy Efficiency, and Security

Opportunistic routing (OR) takes advantages of the spatial diversity and broadcast nature of wireless networks to combat the time-varying links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) for each packet relay. This dissertation studies the properties, energy efficiency, capacity, throughput, protocol design and security issues about OR in multihop wireless networks. Firstly, we study geographic opportunistic routing (GOR), a variant of OR which makes use of nodes’ location information. We identify and prove three important properties of GOR. The first one is on prioritizing the forwarding candidates according to their geographic advancements to the destination. The second one is on choosing the forwarding candidates based on their advancements and link qualities in order to maximize the expected packet advancement (EPA) with different number of forwarding candidates. The third one is on the concavity of the maximum EPA in respect to the number of forwarding candidates. We further propose a local metric, EPA per unit energy consumption, to tradeoff the routing performance and energy efficiency for GOR. Leveraging the proved properties of GOR, we propose two efficient algorithms to select and prioritize forwarding candidates to maximize