HPRP: Hierarchical Probabilistic Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Network

Because of the instability of link quality, traditional network routing protocols, which are mainly based on the condition of "Best Path", can not work very well over wireless mesh networks. Forwarding packets along the "Best Path" may also induce load imbalance among nodes. This paper presents a novel routing protocol named HPRP (Hierarchical Probabilistic Routing Protocol) for wireless mesh networks, which introduces the concept of probabilistic routing for the first time. HPRP doesn’t choose a fixed path, but probabilistically selects next hop for a single packet according to the wireless link loss at that instant. The forwarding probability which is periodically updated makes links with lower loss rates have more chance to be selected. In this way, HPRP can efficiently mitigate the impact of high loss rates, balance the load of nodes and improve the throughput of the network. Simulation results show that HPRP has lower packet delay than the Hyacinth routing protocol, while achieving higher delivery ratio under the circumstances of various services.