An Adaptive Opportunistic Routing Scheme for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

In this paper, an adaptive opportunistic routing scheme for multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes a reinforcement learning framework to achieve the optimal performance even in the absence of reliable knowledge about channel statistics and network model. This scheme is shown to be optimal with respect to an expected average per packet cost criterion. The proposed routing scheme jointly addresses the issues of learning and routing in an opportunistic context, where the network structure is characterized by the transmission success probabilities. In particular, this learning framework leads to a stochastic routing scheme which optimally "explores" and "exploits" the opportunities in the network.