Ali Alshehri*, Hong Huang and Shamsad Parvin
Recently, as a result of the tremendous increases in large-scale multi-hop wireless network communication applications, network capacity has decreases as the number of nodes increase. The existing routing protocols have significant limitations, such as long delays, network infrastructure requirements, limited traffic pattern, or high technical complexity, and efficient spectrum utilization, in terms of the bandwidth efficiency, cannot solve this capacity problem. For this reason, wireless network capacity scaling is a fundamental issue. In this paper, a novel scalable opportunistic routing scheme for a large-scale multi-hop wireless network, is introduced. This proposal presents novelties with respect to both the candidate selection and coordination mechanisms, which will facilitate the improvement of network scalability as well as supporting multimedia traffic. In this routing scheme, we consider a hybrid network, that consists of directed energy (DE) links and omni-directional (OD) antenna links. To quantitatively select the best potential candidate nodes, the forwarder node relies on a proposed metric termed scalable opportunistic objective function (SOOF) which considers DE link presence, one-hop throughput, node mobility, and expected distance progress toward destination. We compare the performance of the proposed routing scheme with three other relevant protocols: DSDV, AODV, and GOR. For precise analysis, the performance of the routing protocols is evaluated by considering various network metrics. Our simulation result validates our analysis and demonstrates that the proposed routing scheme significantly outperforms the relevant routing protocols.