SourceShift: Resilient Routing in Highly Dynamic Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless networks have to support an increasing number of devices with increasing demands on mobility and resilience. Mesh network routing protocols provide an elegant solution to the problem of connecting mobile nodes, due to their ability to adapt to topology changes. However, with increasing number of nodes and increasing mobility of the nodes, maintaining sufficiently recent routing information becomes increasingly challenging. Existing routing protocols fail to operate reliably in case of sudden link or node failures.In this work, we propose a new routing approach called SourceShift to resiliently handle dynamic networks in the absence of current network status information. SourceShift uses opportunistic routing and network coding, like MORE, but also makes use of link local feedback, like ExOR. We evaluate SourceShift in random network topologies with link and node failures and compare the results with the state of the art. The evaluation shows that SourceShift can ensure the delivery of the message when feasible. Additionally, the use of local feedback can improve the airtime efficiency compared to other routing protocols, even in cases without link or node failures. As a result, SourceShift requires less than half the airtime of state of the art routing protocols in more than 60% of the evaluated cases.