A Priority Based Opportunistic Routing Mechanism for Real-Time Voice Service in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Traditional routing protocols send traffic along pre-determined paths and have been shown ineffective in coping with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium which is caused by the multi-path fading. The most difference between the opportunistic routing and the traditional routing mechanism is that the opportunistic routing mechanism can use several lossy broadcast links to support reliable transmission. In this paper, an opportunistic routing mechanism for real-time voice service is proposed. This mechanism is based on the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol with some modifications, the routing messages of DSR are used to construct the forwarder list, which guides the data packets forwarding process. The forwarder nodes have priorities to restrict the number of duplicated packets. Simultaneous flows can be supported well by our mechanism. Simulations show that our mechanism can effectively decrease the data packets transmission times and the amount of the control messages and reduce the end-to-end delay for real-time voice service, the quality of service can be supported well over the unstable wireless channel.