Link Lifetime and Quality-Based Location Routing for Maritime Wireless Mesh Networks

Maritime wireless mesh network (MWMN) has emerged as a cost-effective solution to provide network connectivity for a growing number of maritime users. Routing protocol plays an increasingly important role for the provision of reliable and stable communication in such a network. However, previous works have drawn little attention to the influence of the variable sea surface condition and ship mobility pattern when making routing decisions. In this paper, we propose a novel link lifetime and quality-based location routing (LLQLR) algorithm for an MWMN, with a joint consideration of link lifetime and quality. We first estimate the ship’s future location with the help of Kalman filter, then predict the lifetime and quality factor of a link between current ship and its neighbor and calculate the weighted forwarding metric (WFM). Accordingly, the neighbor with maximum value of WFM is selected as the packet forwarder. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm by extensive simulations and compare it with the existing algorithms. Simulation results show that LLQLR achieves a significant performance improvement with respect to packet delivery ratio and average packet delay variation.