Hindawi Publishing Corporation

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume 2010, Article ID 148359, 9 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/148359

Research Article
Throughput Capacity of Opportunistic Routing in Wireless
Sensor Networks

Xiaoguang Niu1, 2 and Li Cui1

1 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
2 Graduate School of Chinese Academic of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Li Cui, lcui@ict.ac.cn

Received 1 January 2009; Revised 15 April 2009; Accepted 15 May 2009

Copyright © 2010 X. Niu and L. Cui. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Recently, the idea of opportunistic routing (OR) has been widely explored to cope with the unreliable transmissions by exploiting
the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the wireless medium in order to improve the performance of wireless sensor networks.
However, there are few theoretical analyses on the maximum throughput of OR WSNs. This paper is the first attempt to conduct a
theoretical analysis on aggregate throughput capacity of OR in multihop many-to-one WSNs with consideration for lossy link and
transmission fairness. By capturing the key characteristics of forwarding candidate set in OR networks, we propose the cumulative
delivery transmission model. Then we introduce the concept of concurrent schedulable set to represent the constraints imposed
by the transmission conflicts of OR, and formulate the optimal aggregate throughput problem as a maximum concurrent flow
linear programming problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the OR design derived from our analysis model often yields
noticeably better throughput than traditional unicast routing protocols and the OR design derived from existing analysis model
under a range of scenarios.

1. Introduction algorithms and evaluating their performance gain through a

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are quickly gaining pop-
ularity due to their potentially easy deployment at low cost
without relying on the existing infrastructure to a variety
of real world challenges. Traditional routing protocols for
WSNs follow the concept of routing in wired networks by
abstracting the wireless links as wired links. However, these
routing protocols ignore that the infrastructureless property
and the unstable nature of the wireless medium incur the
problem of unreliable communication [1].
To address this problem, opportunistic routing (OR) has
been proposed as a new routing paradigm [2]. OR utilizes the
high-node density, space diversity, and broadcast advantage
of wireless communication to increase the reliability of a
single transmission. Instead of relying on one next-hop node
to forward a data packet, OR predetermines a set of candidate
relays with a priority order and selects the highest-priority
relay that indeed receives the packet as the actual forwarder,
based on the instantaneous availability.
Researchers have proposed several candidate selection
and prioritization schemes to improve throughput [3–5] or
energy efficiency [6, 7]. The existing works on OR mainly
focused on developing various types of opportunistic routing
number of simulations and empirical measurements [2, 6, 8–
11]. However, there is a lack of theoretical analysis on the
maximum throughput of OR WSNs. In this paper, we carry
out an analytical approach to study the potential capacity
enhancement of opportunistic routing in WSNs. Unlike
other analytical studies which use a deterministic channel
model [6, 12], our approach explores the key characteristics
of opportunistic routing (i.e., its ability to take advantage
of numerous unreliable wireless links in the network in a
probabilistic manner). Taking into consideration of wireless
interference, we propose cumulative delivery transmission
model in contrast to individual delivery transmission conflict
model [12]. Then we introduce the concept of concurrent
schedulable set to represent the constraints imposed by
transmission conflicts, and formulate a maximum concur-
rent flow linear programming problem, subjected to the
transmission conflict constraints, to compute the optimal
aggregate throughput that many-to-one WSNs can support.
We show that finding optimal aggregate throughput is a
NP-hard problem, and present methods for computing the
optimal aggregate throughput bounds of OR WSNs. The
knowledge of throughput capacity can be used to reject
any excessive traffic in the admission control for real-time
2 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
ni1
Pii1
Pi2i1
ni Pii2
ni2 Pi3i1
Pii3 Pi2i3
Pi3d
Pii4 ni3
Pi2i4
Pi4d
Pi3i4
ni4
Figure 1: Opportunistic routing in the subgraph of Roofnet.
services. Furthermore, the derivation of throughput of OR
may suggest novel and efficient candidate selection and
prioritization schemes.
We view the cumulative delivery transmission model
and the aggregate throughput capacity analysis framework
for OR WSNs with consideration for lossy links and
transmission fairness as the key contributions of our work.
Simulation results show that the OR design derived from our
analysis model often achieves noticeably better throughput
than traditional unicast routing protocols and the OR design
derived from existing analysis model under a range of
scenarios with different traffic demands.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
introduces the system model. We present details of cumu-
lative transmission delivery model and the framework of
computing the optimal network throughput bounds of OR
in Section 3. Simulation results are presented and analyzed
in Section 4. In Section 5, we discuss related works. Section 6
concludes the paper.
2. System Model
2.1. Opportunistic Routing Framework. The basic module of
opportunistic routing employed by the well-known Roofnet
[13] is shown in Figure 1. Assume node ni is transmitting
a packet to the destination node nd , and the other four
nodes are the candidates for forwarding. Each link packet
delivery ratio (LPDR), denoted as Pk, j for the link between
node nk and node n j , is shown in Figure 1. We denote the
set of nodes which receive the packet from node ni as the
neighboring node set Ci of node ni . Each node selects a
subset of its neighbors as forwarding candidate set (FCS)
and assigns a priority to each of the candidates, denoted as
Fi := ni1 , ni2 , ni3 , ni4  for node ni shown in Figure 1, which
includes all the nodes selected to be involved in the local
opportunistic forwarding based on a particular selection
strategy. Note that, Fi is an ordered set, in which the order
of the elements corresponds to their priority in forwarding a
received packet.
When node ni broadcasts a packet, the nodes which
indeed receive the packet in its forwarding candidate set Fi
respond. One of the candidate nodes continues the forward-
ing based on their relay priority –A candidate will forward
the packet only when it is of the highest priority among the
nodes which have received the packet. For example, if the
Pi1d first node ni1 in the set has received the packet successfully,
it forwards the packet towards the destination while all
nd other nodes suppress duplicate forwarding. Otherwise, the
second node ni2 , the third node ni3 , the forth node ni4 , and
so forth. When no forwarding candidate has successfully
received the packet, the sender ni will retransmit the packet
if retransmission is enabled. The forwarding reiterates until
the packet is delivered to the destination node nd .
2.2. Packet Level Lossy Wireless Interference Model. Wireless
interference is a key issue affecting throughput [14]. As OR
exploits the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the
wireless medium by selecting unreliable wireless links in
order to achieve better performance, the wireless interference
model should be nonbinary and reflect the features of
lossy links. Therefore, we propose the packet level lossy
wireless interference model to define the conditions for a lossy
wireless transmission. This model is similar to the receiver
interference model of packet level loss rates introduced in
[14].
The packet level lossy wireless interference model takes
as input traffic demand and received signal strength (RSS)
between pairs of nodes. It then estimates the rate at which
each sender will transmit and the rate at which each receiver
will successfully receive the packets. To compute the link
packet delivery ratio, we model the inherent medium loss
as well as collision loss. In this paper, we assume that the
packet transmissions among individual nodes can be finely
controlled and carefully scheduled by an omniscient and
omnipotent central entity, which guarantees that there is
no MAC contention. So different from [14], we only take
as the asynchronous loss that occurs when at least one
sender cannot carrier sense the other because there is no
synchronous collision. The link packet delivery ratio between
node nm and node nn initiated by node nsi is
   
si COL
Pm,n = 1 − 1 − LRSS
mn × 1 − Lmn|si , (1)
where LRSS
mn is the inherent packet loss rate on link lmn which is
a constant value for node nsi ; LCOL
mn|si is asynchronous collision
packet loss on link lmn caused by node nsi , which can be
modeled as
 8 f
LCOL b
mn|Si = 1 − 1 − Lmn|Si , (2)
where f is the length of the packet transmitted by node nm ,
Lbmn|Si is the collision bit error rate defined as
1
Lbmn|Si = × expγmn|Si /2 , (3)
2
where γmn|Si = Rmn /(An + Rsi n ) is the signal to interference
plus noise ratio (SINR) of link lmn interfered by node nsi , Rmn
is the received signal strength at node nn , An is the ambient
noise of node nn , and Rsin is the interference at node nn from
node nsi .
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Inferred from (1), (2), and (3), we can model the link
packet delivery ratio of lmn over node nsi as a function of Rmn
and Rsin :
   8 f
si 1 {ni1 , ni3 , ni4 , nd }
Pm,n = 1 − 1 − LRSS
mn × 1 − × expRmn /2(An +Rsi n )
2 {nd }
Similarly, we can get the cumulative link packet delivery
ratio (CPR), denoted as Pm,n , as the following:
 8 f
  1 
Pm,n = 1 − 1 − LRSS
mn × 1 − × expRmn /2(An + k =/ m Rkn )
2
We say that a directed link li j from node ni to n j is usable
when Pm,n is larger than a positive threshold Ptd . Notice that
our definition of Ptd in OR networks which is generally less
than 20% is much smaller than that in traditional routing
networks (e.g., the Ptd in [15] is more than 80%).
3. Computing Bounds on Optimal
Throughput of OR in Multiflow Wireless
Sensor Networks
The optimal aggregate throughput is a fundamental issue in
OR WSNs. We say that an aggregate throughput D in OR
WSNs is feasible if there exists a schedule of transmissions
such that no two interfering transmissions are simultane-
ously active which is impacted by the specific forwarding
candidate selection and prioritization scheme, and the total
throughput for the given source-destination pairs is D.
In this section, we present our framework to compute
the optimal aggregate throughput in a given many-to-one
WSN with a given OR strategy. We first introduce four
concepts, cumulative delivery ratio, concurrent schedulable
set, weighted node interference graph, and entirely coopera-
tive conflict set, which are used to represent the constraints
imposed by the interference among transmissions in a WSN.
We then present methods for computing bounds on the
optimal aggregate throughput that an OR WSN can support.
3.1. Cumulative Delivery Ratio. As we adopt a packet level
lossy wireless interference model, we need to identify the
delivery rate of a transmission in OR-based WSNs. Because
by the nature of opportunistic routing, for one transmission,
throughput may take place on multiple links, we intro-
duce cumulative delivery ratio (CDR) on each transmission
according to a specified OR strategy. Assume node ni ’s
forwarding candidate set is Fi := ni1 , ni2 . . . nir , with relay
priorities ni1 > ni2 > · · · > nir , which are fixed in OR
network with a specific OR policy. For the interference of
the concurrent transmitting nodes, only part of forwarding
candidates in FCS are usable which are termed as the effective
forwarder candidate set (EFCS). Let ϕq denote the indicator
function on link liiq in a particular time: ϕq = 1 indicating
link liiq is usable, and ϕq = 0 indicating that link liiq is not
3
ni
{ni1 , ni2 , ni3 , ni4 }
Ri,i2 Ri,i1
ni2
Ri1,i2 ni1
. (4)
Ri,i4 Ri,i3
Ri2,i4 Ri2,i3
Ri1,i3
ni4 ni3
{nd } Ri3,i4 {ni1 , ni4 , nd }
.
(5) Figure 2: Weighted interference graph for OR Roofnet.
usable. Then the cumulative transmission delivery rate of
node ni in that particular time is defined as:

r −1
k
CDRi = ϕk · pi,ik · 1 − ϕt · pi,it , (6)
k=1 t =0
where pi,i0 := 0. From (6) we can deduce that the CDR of
a specified node ni is related to the forwarding candidate
selection policy and those concurrent transmitting nodes
which may interfere in or even invalidate some links between
ni and its forwarding candidates.
3.2. Weighted Node Interference Graph and Transmission
Conflict. Link conflict graph has been used as a handy
tool to model wireless interference for traditional routing
networks [15, 16]. However, this link-based conflict graph
cannot be directly applied to study capacity problem of OR
networks because throughput OR may take place on multiple
links. Reference [12] proposed a construction of transmitter
conflict graph to facilitate the computation of throughput
bounds of OR. In this graph, each vertex corresponds to a
node in the original connectivity graph. There is an edge
between two vertices if the two nodes cannot be transmitting
simultaneously due to a conflict caused by the unusable links
more than the threshold. However, this transmitter-based
conflict graph only denotes a transmission conflict between
two nodes but cannot capture the characteristics of joint
effect and asymmetry of the transmission conflict in OR
networks.
Therefore, taking wireless interference effects into
account, we construct a weighted interference graph G for
OR networks as shown in Figure 2. In this graph, each vertex
corresponds to a node associated with its forwarder can-
didates. The transmission interference gradually increases
as more neighboring nodes transmit simultaneously, and
becomes intolerable when the total interference noise level
reaches a threshold. This gradual increase in interference
suggests that we should have a weighted node interference
graph, where the weight of an edge between vertices ni
to vertices n j (denoted by Ri, j ) indicates what fraction of
interference noise at node n j is contributed by node ni .
We redefine the concept of transmission conflict to
capture OR’s opportunistic nature and the characteristics of
4 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

(1) Initialize a empty CSS C in the interference graph G;

(2) Build a random ordering set V = {n1 , n2 , . . . nr } of all vertices in G;
(3) Add the first vertex n1 in V to C and remove n1 from V;
(4) While the set V is not empty do
(5) remove the first vertex ni from the set V;
(6) if ((CDRi ≥ CDRthresh )&&
(CDRk ≥ CDRthresh )) ∀nk ∈ C then
(7) Add ni to C;
(8) return the maximal CCS C which is of size at least one;

Algorithm 1: The Maximal CSS solution.

joint effect and asymmetry of the transmission interference communications between source node set Ns {ns1 , ns2 . . . nsi }
in OR networks. Node m is termed to have a “transmission and a single destination nd , we formulate the optimal
conflict” caused by some node set Cm when node m and node aggregate throughput problem of OR WSNs as a linear
set Cm are simultaneously transmitting and the cumulative programming corresponding to a maximum concurrent flow
delivery rate of node m is less than a certain threshold problem under additional constraints, in (7)–(16) which
CDRthresh (i.e., CDRm ≤ CDRthresh ) due to the joint introduce the LP formulations used to optimize the aggregate
interference of the nodes in Cm on its forwarder candidates. throughput for Many-to-One OR WSNs,
The node set Cm is named as the cooperative conflict set over
node m (denoted by CCSm ), and i-CCSm denotes that there 
are i nodes in the cooperative conflict set, which can be Max feffsi ,si
nsi ∈Ns
obtained via the weighted interference graph.
s j ,s j (7)
s.t. γ × feff ≤ feffsi ,si ≤ Ssi
3.3. Cumulative Delivery-Based Concurrent Schedulable Sets.  
∀nsi ∈ NS , ∀ns j ∈ Ns \ nsi ,
We introduce the notion of cumulative delivery based
 d,s  s ,s
concurrent schedulable set (CSS) in the packet level lossy feff i = feffi i , (8)
wireless interference model for OR WSNs, which is the nsi ∈Ns nsi ∈Ns
foundation of our method of computing optimal aggregate 
throughput. A CSS is defined as a set of nodes, in which when feffk,si ≤ i,si
feff
they are transmitting simultaneously, none of which has a ni ∈Fk (9)
transmission conflict caused by all the other nodes in that ∀nsi ∈ Ns , ∀nk ∈ Nc \ {nd },
set. If adding any one more node into a CSS will result in
the usability status of any nodes in that set, the CSS is called feffk,si ≤ fact
k,si
× CDRk
(10)
maximal CSS. (In the following of this paper, CSS refers ∀nsi ∈ Ns , ∀nk ∈ Nc \ {nd },
to maximal CSS.) The idea is to allow a node to transmit d,si
as long as it can deliver some throughput which meets the fact =0 ∀nsi ∈ Ns , (11)
requirement of cumulative delivery rate threshold to some of  i,sk
fact ≤ capi ∀ni ∈ Nc \ {nd }, (12)
its forwarder candidates. The maximal CSSs can be obtained nsk ∈Ns
through Algorithm 1.

T

3.4. LP Formulation on Optimal Aggregate Throughput of OR λm ≤ 1, (13)

m=0
in Many-to-One WSNs. The optimal aggregate throughput
problem can be described as the intersection of two kinds of λm ≥ 0, 1 ≤ m ≤, (14)
constraints—the flow conservation and fairness constraints  
and the wireless interference constraints [12, 15]. We make feffk,si ≤ λm Cap j
nsi ∈Ns n j ∈CSSm ,1≤m≤T,nk ∈F j
the following observation. Suppose there are a total of K
maximal CSSs {CSS1 , CSS2 . . . CSSm } in interference graph × ϕm
j,k × P j,k
G. At any time, at most one CSS is scheduled to transmit, F −j 1 (nk )−1
and all the nodes in that set can transmit simultaneously. Let   
constant γ (0 < γ ≤ 1) be the upper bound of throughput × 1 − ϕ j,F j (l) · P j,F j (l)
l=0
ratio between any pair of data flows, and λi (0 < λi <  
1) denote the fraction of time allocated to the CSSi (i.e., ∀nk ∈ Nc \ nsi ,
the time during which the nodes in CSSi can transmit (15)
packets). Then the maximum aggregate throughput problem  i,sk

can be converted to an optimal scheduling problem that fact λm Capi
nsk ∈Ns ni ∈CSSm ,1≤m≤T (16)
schedules the transmission of the maximal CSSs to maxi-
mize the aggregate throughput. Therefore, by considering ∀ni ∈ Nc \ {nd }.
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
j,s
In (7)–(16), fact i denotes the amount of data flow derived
j,s
from source node nsi actually transmitted by node n j ; feff i
denotes the amount of data flow derived from source node
nsi required to be transmitted by node n j ; Nc denotes the
whole node set in the interference graph G; Ssi is the data
generation rate of the source nsi ; Fk (i) denotes the ith forward
candidate in node nk ’s forwarder candidate set Fk ; Fk−1 (ni )
denote the index of node n j in node nk ’s forwarder candidate
set Fk ; Capi denotes the transmission capacity of node ni ; P j,k
denotes the cumulative link packet delivery ratio between
node n j and node nk ; ϕmj,k denotes the indicator function on
forwarder candidate nk of node n j when n j is in a particular
concurrent schedulable set CSSm ; ϕmj,k = 1 indicating nk is
usable, and ϕmj,k = 0 indicating otherwise.
The maximization states that we wish to maximize the
sum of flow out of the all source nodes, in which con-
straints (7)–(12) denote the flow conservation and fairness
constraints and constraints (13)–(16) denote the wireless
interference constraints. The constraint (7) represents the
flow validity and fairness, that is, the amount of effective
flow derived from each source node is constrained by its
data generation rate and the amount of effective flow derived
from other source node. The constraint (8) states that flow-
conservation, that is, the amount of outgoing flows from all
source nodes is equal to the amount of incoming flow of
the sink node. The constraint (9) indicates that the amount
of effective flow of every node, except the sink node, is
constrained by the total amount of effective flows of those
nodes whose forwarder candidate sets involve that node.
The constraint (10) denotes that the amount of effective
flow of each node, except sink node, is constrained by the
amount of outgoing flow of that node and its cumulative
delivery rate. The constraint (11) says that the outgoing flow
from sink node is 0. The constraint (12) represents that
the amount of outgoing flow on each node cannot exceed
its transmission capacity. The constraint (13) states that at
any time, at most one CSS will be scheduled to transmit.
The constraint (14) restricts that the scheduled time fraction
should be non-negative. The constraint (15) indicates that
the amount of effective flow delivered by each node, except
source nodes, is constrained by the total amount of flow
that can be delivered in all activity periods of those nodes
whose effective forwarder candidate sets involve that node.
The constraint (16) denotes that the amount of outgoing
flow on every node, except sink node, is constrained by the
sum of the activity periods of the concurrent schedulable sets
which it is a member.
The key difference of our maximum of flow formulations
from the formulations for opportunistic routing in [12]
lies in the methodology we use to schedule concurrent
transmissions. In our proposed model, we involve the factor
of the cumulative delivery ratio in flow conservation and
fairness considerations which can accurately captures OR’s
capability of delivering throughput opportunistically. With
the construction of cumulative delivery-based concurrent
schedulable sets, we are able to schedule the transmissions
based on node set whose cumulative delivery ratio exceeds
a threshold the same as in traditional routing, which
5
guarantees a high throughput by balancing the tradeoff
between packet loss rate and transmission rate. While in [12]
it schedules the transmissions based on node set without any
delivery rate consideration which will induce the conflict
between packet loss rate and transmission rate. That is why
our model achieves higher throughput than that of [12]. The
detail comparison will be given in the next section.
3.5. Hardness Result. Now, we present a hardness result
for computing the optimal aggregate throughput with LP
formulation shown in (7)–(16). The part of flow conser-
vation and fairness constraints (i.e., constraints (7)–(12))
is a simple structure on which a linear objective function
can easily be optimized. While for the part of wireless
interference constraints (i.e., constraint (13)–(16)), the con-
current schedulable set, on the other hand, is a difficult
structure and no characterization of it is known (because
there may be exponentially many CSSs [17]). When each
node has only one forwarding candidate, OR degenerates to
the traditional routing. Therefore, finding all the concurrent
schedulable sets is at least as hard as the NP-hard problem of
finding the independent sets in [15] for traditional routing.
Correspondingly, it is NP-hard to find the optimal aggregate
throughput in OR WSNs.
Even though it is a NP-hard problem, complexity can
be reduced by taking into consideration that transmission
conflicts always happen for nodes within certain range.
We can look at heuristics for obtaining bounds on the
throughput to approximate the optimal aggregate of OR
WSNs.
3.6. Lower Bound. The problem of deriving a lower bound
is equivalent to the problem of finding a network aggregate
throughput that has a feasible schedule to achieve it. Suppose
we can get T  CSSs through Algorithm 1. If we replace the
schedule restrictions imposed by all the CSSs in the original
linear program (i.e., constraints (13)–(16)) with those
imposed by the found T  CSSs, the resulting throughput
always has a feasible scheme, and therefore constitutes a
lower bound on the maximum achievable throughput. To
tighten the bound, we should consider using maximal CSSs
as much as possible.
3.7. Upper Bound. To derive an upper bound, we consider a
maximal set of nodes in the interference graph that mutually
have transmission conflicts with each other which is termed
as one-node level entirely cooperative conflict set (ECCS1 ). The
total utilization of the nodes in each ECCS1 is less than 1.
Similarly, the i-nodes level entirely cooperative conflict set
(ECCSi ), a maximal set of nodes that any node can transmit
packet simultaneously with part of other nodes in the set but
has a transmission conflict caused by all the other i nodes. In
ECCSi , the total utilization of the nodes is less than i-1, the
proof for which is not included due to space constraints.
We define i-ECCS as denotes a set of ECCSs including
ECCS1 , ECCS2 , . . . and ECCSi , which gives us a constraint
on the usage vector. For example, we can find all the X
ECCS1 s in 1-ECCS and write corresponding constraints to
6 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

7 × 7 grid, 2 flows, per-flow sending rate = 1

S11 n12 n13 n14 n15 n16 n17 0.8

0.7
S21 n22 n23 n24 n25 n26 n27
0.6

Aggregate throughput
0.5
S31 n32 n33 n34 n35 n36 n37
0.4

0.3
S41 n42 n43 n44 n45 n46 D47
0.2

S51 n52 n53 n54 n55 n56 n57 0.1

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
S61 n62 n63 n64 n65 n66 n67 Number of acquired CSSs ×104

Lower bound 3-ECCS upper bound

1-ECCS upper bound 4-ECCS upper bound
S71 n72 n73 n74 n75 n76 n77 2-ECCS upper bound

Figure 3: 7×7 grid WSN. Figure 4: Aggregate throughput bounds of COR with varying
constraints.

define a polytope. We can then maximize the aggregate
throughput over the intersection of this polytope with
the flow constraints in the original linear program (i.e.,
constraints (7)–(12)). Thus an upper bound can be obtained.

λi ≤ 1 1 ≤ m ≤ X,
ni ∈ECCS1m
λi ≥ 0 ∀ni ∈ ECCS1m , 1 ≤ m ≤ X,
 deviation of 0.1 and that all the wireless links have an
i,sk
fact ≤ λi Capi ∀ni ∈ Nc \ {nd }, 1 ≤ m ≤ X.
nsk ∈NS
These constraints may result in a loose bound since there
may not be abundant ECCS1 s. To tighten the upper bound,
we further augment the LP formulation with the more ECCS
constraints by larger i-ECCSs.
Unfortunately, it is computationally expensive to find all
levels of the ECCSs, and even if we could find them all, there
is still no guarantee that our upper bound will be tight.
4. Performance Evaluation
This section uses Matlab to investigate the performance of
OR variant: ExOR [2] in many-to-one WSNs. The section
is organized as follows. We first present the illustrative
results that demonstrate the flexibility of our cumulative
delivery-based OR analytical model (COR) to discuss the
issue of convergence of the upper and lower bounds on
the optimal aggregate throughput. We also investigate the
maximum aggregate throughput in a wide range of scenarios
with different traffic demands and compare them with those
derived from of the traditional multipath routing analytical
model (MPR) [15] and the individual delivery-based OR
routing analytical model (IOR) [12].
4.1. Simulation Setup. The simulated network has 49 sta-
tionary nodes uniformly distributed in a 900 m × 900 m
square region shown in Figure 3. We fix the seven nodes
in the first column of the grid as the source candidates,
and all of them communicate with the same destination
node located in the center of the last column. The PRR
(17) threshold ptd in multipath routing and OR routing is set
to 0.8 and 0.1, respectively. We assume that the PRR is
(18) inversely proportional to the distance with random Gaussian
identical capacity (i.e., speed) of 1 unit. Similar to [18],
(19)
we use a single interference range 500 m for simplicity. The
performance metric is the aggregate throughput.
4.2. Aggregate Throughput Bounds of Traditional Multipath
Routing and OR Under COR Model. In this section we
consider a scenario in the 7 × 7 simulated network that the
two nodes S31 , S51 are selected as the sources and the sending
rate of each source as 1.
Figure 4 shows the upper and lower bounds of aggregate
throughput for OR WSNs derived from our COR model with
varying constraints. We can see that the upper bound quickly
converges to the stable value. More specifically, the more
ECCS constraints being employed, the more accurate upper
bound approaching the optimal value is achieved. The lower
bound, on the other hand, steadily converges to the optimal
value as the number of acquired CSSs increases. However, the
upper bound and lower bound cannot converge together due
to the fact that the ECCS constraints alone are not sufficient
to guarantee optimality of the upper bound, even all ECCS
constraints are involved.
We pick N relaying nodes from 46 available nodes (i.e.,
they do not include the two sources and the destination),
at random, and without replacement. Then, in such a 2-
flow network, the resulting normalized maximum aggregate
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
60
Normalized maximum aggregate throughput
50
40
30
20
10
0 universal heavy lossy links in sparse networks, while in a
5 10 15
2-Flow COR
2-Flow MPR
Figure 5: Normalized maximum aggregate throughput in WSNs
with varying node densities.
throughput derived from our model and multipath routing
model [15] for various values of N is potted in Figure 5.
Note that the normalized maximum aggregate throughput
continues to rise as the increase of the relaying node. This
means that the richer connectivity provided by additional
nodes allows for new routes, and allows extra traffic to be
sent through the network. Figure 5 shows that the aggregate
throughput derived from COR model is higher than that
derived from MPR model because OR’s ability to take
advantage of the numerous, yet unreliable wireless links.
Figure 6 indicates the relation between the per-flow
sending rate and the maximum aggregate throughput in a
WSN with varying traffic load. In Figure 6(a), the maximum
aggregate throughput increases quickly (i.e., the networks
are unsaturated) in the incipient stage and then the increase
slows down. The reason is that the network fails to transmit
most of the overloading traffic as more traffic is injected into
the networks which are being saturated. Because the total
traffic of all flows increase steadily, the normalized maximum
aggregate throughput of the network declines quickly the
increase of the per-flow sending rate.
From Figures 5 and 6, we can observe that OR achieves
much higher aggregate throughput than traditional multi-
path routing. The difference of OR from traditional routing
is that, by allowing multiple nodes to opportunistically
forward a packet, the medium time utility is improved, thus
the throughput is enhanced.
4.3. OR Throughput Comparison under Different Models.
Now we compare the maximum throughput derived from
our COR model and two IOR models (i.e., greedy mode
and conservative mode). Since both IOR models support one
flow at most we consider an OR network with only one flow
and set node S41 as the source, sending rate of source as
1. From Figure 7, we can observe that maximum aggregate
7
Per-flow sending rate = 1 throughput derived from both OR models increases as the
richer connectivity provided by additional nodes allows for
new forwarding candidates, and allows extra traffic to be
sent through the network. Figure 7 indicates that COR model
results in higher aggregate throughput than both IOR models
because COR model makes the most use of any qualified
chance to deliver a packet to the next hop.
Figure 7 also presents an interesting result that the
conservative IOR model performs better than the greedy IOR
when the number of relaying nodes is less than 25 while
performing worse than the greedy IOR when the number
of relaying nodes is beyond 25. The reason is that when
the number of relaying nodes is less than 25, the greedy
IOR needs to perform more retransmissions due to the
20 25 30 35 40 45 50 dense network the conservative IOR excludes the situations
Number of nodes where concurrent transmission is able to deliver throughput
on some of the reliable links even though other links are
having conflicts.
5. Related Works
Opportunistic routing (OR) is mainly proposed to address
the unreliable communication in multihop wireless networks
which exploits the broadcast advantage of the wireless
medium by involving a set of forwarding candidates instead
of only one in traditional routing [2–5, 7–10]. ExOR [2]
and utility-based OR [8], rely on the path cost information
or global knowledge of the network to select candidates
and prioritize them. MORE [9] presents a low-complexity
distributed algorithm for intraflow network coding to deliver
opportunistic routing gains which allow it to exploit the
spatial reuse available and be easily extensible to multicast
traffic. Unlike previous packet level opportunistic routing,
MIXIT [10] firstly presents a symbol-level opportunistic
routing by exploiting partially correct receptions instead of
only fully correct packet, which profitably takes advantage of
bit-level wireless spatial diversity to achieve high throughput.
However, there are few theoretical works determining the
aggregate throughput bounds of OR in many-to-one WSNs.
The theoretical performance capacity study on multihop
wireless networks mainly focuses on the throughput bounds
for a given network [19]. Jain et al. proposed a framework
to calculate the throughput bounds of traditional routing
between a pair of nodes by adding wireless interference
constraints into the maximum flow formulations [15]. Zhai
and Fang studied the path capacity of traditional routing
in a multirate scenario [16]. Li et al. presented a model
to accurately predict the resulting throughput of individual
flows and optimize the network for fairness and through-
put [19]. Zeng et al. studied the end-to-end throughput
capacity of OR networks, which only adopted the wireless
interference model which cannot reflect the characteristics
of OR networks and considered the scenarios of single flow
and saturated traffic demand [12]. Our work falls into this
direction. However, distinguished from the previous works,
we adopt a packet level lossy interference model [14] and
propose a method to compute the aggregate throughput
bounds of opportunistic routing, which is much different
8 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

7 × 7 grid, coef. of flow fairness = 2 7 × 7 grid, coef. of flow fairness = 2

0.8 100

Normalized maximum aggregate throughput

0.75 90
0.7
Maximum aggregate throughput

80
0.65
70
0.6
60
0.55
50
0.5
40
0.45
30
0.4
0.35 20

0.3 10
0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Per-flow sending rate Per-flow sending rate

2-Flow COR 2-Flow MPR 2-Flow COR 2-Flow MPR

3-Flow COR 3-Flow MPR 3-Flow COR 3-Flow MPR
5-Flow COR 5-Flow MPR 5-Flow COR 5-Flow MPR
(a) Maximum aggregate throughput (b) Normalized Maximum aggregate throughput

Figure 6: Maximum aggregate throughput in a WSN with varying traffic load.

Per-flow sending rate = 1 WSNs. Taking into consideration of an accurate packet-

60
level lossy wireless interference model, we proposed a new
Normalized maximum aggregate throughput

method of constructing concurrent schedulable sets, and

50 formulated the optimal aggregate throughput problem of
OR as a maximum concurrent flow problem subject to
40 the transmission conflict constraints. We also presented
a methodology for computing the aggregate throughput
30 bounds of OR in many-to-one WSNs.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first the-
oretical work on capacity problem of OR with different
20
traffic demands for multihop of many-to-one WSNs with
consideration for lossy link and transmission fairness. We
10 validate the analysis results by simulation, which shows that
the throughput bound derived from our COR model is much
0 closer to the optimal value than that derived from existing
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 IOR model and that OR has great potential to improve
Number of nodes aggregate throughput.
1-Flow COR
1-Flow IOR (conservative)
1-Flow IOR (greedy)
Acknowledgments

Figure 7: Normalized maximum aggregate throughput in WSNs

This paper was partially supported by the National Key
with varying node densities. Basic Research Program of China “973 Project” (Grants no.
2006CB303000) and NSFC (Grants no. 60533110 and no.
60572060).
from the existing methods in that we exploit cumulative
transmission delivery instead of individual link delivery to References
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