Joint Multichannel-Spatial Diversity for Efficient Opportunistic Routing in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Low-power wireless networks (LPWNs) are of paramount importance for the pervasive deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT). To deal with the lossy nature of LPWNs, opportunistic routing (OR) and multichannel communications (MC) have received significant research interests. In particular, coupling OR with MC has become an important way to further enhance the communication performance in LPWNs. However, as OR requires nodes in the same channel while MC separates nodes into different channels, the benefits of MC-OR combination are largely under-utilized. To address this problem, we investigate the challenging issue of establishing opportunistic routing in multichannel LPWNs. Different from the existing studies that separately assign channels and select forwarders, we propose a synergistic multichannel and opportunistic routing (SMOpp) approach, which jointly combines the benefits of both OR and MC by considering link correlation. SMOpp explicitly evaluates the routing opportunities of each channel/forwarder set and then employs a forwarder-initiated scheme to select the best combinations of senders, forwarders, and channels. The testbed evaluation shows that compared to the existing methods, SMOpp significantly improves the transmission efficiency for LPWNs.