BOR/AC: Bandwidth-aware opportunistic routing with admission control in wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic routing (OR) is a viable approach for improving performance of wireless communications. Previous studies on OR have focused on cost minimization, performance of multiple rates, congestion control, and other issues. Bandwidth assurance over OR, however, has not been adequately investigated. To bridge this gap, we present a bandwidth-aware opportunistic routing (BOR) with admission control (AC) protocol named BOR/AC. In particular, by analyzing the expected available bandwidth (EAB) and the expected transmission cost (ETC) in OR, we first devise a new metric called BCR (bandwidth-cost ratio) to determine the priority of relays in the forwarding candidates set. Admission control is then applied to admit or reject traffic flows based on estimated expected available bandwidth. Extensive simulation results show that BOR/AC consistently achieves much better performance than existing opportunistic routing protocols.