An opportunistic routing mechanism for real‐time voice service in mobile ad hoc networks

The opportunistic routing mechanism can use several lossy broadcast links to support reliable transmission. In this paper, a simple opportunistic routing mechanism for real‐time multimedia services is proposed. This mechanism is based on the dynamic source routing protocol with some modifications, multiple route request, and route reply messages are used to construct the forwarder list, and the nodes within the forwarder list forward the packets which they overhear. The forwarder list is placed on the packet header in the form of a Bloom filter, which will restrict the size of the forwarder list to a constant value. There are no strict scheduling mechanisms for the forwarding order of the forwarder nodes, thus our opportunistic routing mechanism can be scalable for multiple simultaneous flows. Simulations show that our mechanism can effectively decrease the transmission times and the amount of the control messages for each packet and reduce the end‐to‐end delay for real‐time voice service, the quality of service for these services can be supported well over the unstable wireless channel. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.