Blacklist-aided forwarding in static multihop wireless networks

Static broadband wireless networks, due to their ease of deployment, are likely to proliferate in the near future. The major stumbling block, however, is that wireless links are prone to external interference, channel fading, inclement weather, etc. Therefore scalable and reliable routing despite frequent link quality fluctuations is needed for accelerating the growth of these networks. Most of the wireless routing schemes proposed in the literature are less suitable for these networks, as they are designed primarily for mobile ad hoc networks with dynamic and unpredictable topologies. In this paper, we propose a novel link-state-based blacklist-aided forwarding (BAF) approach, that takes advantage of the fact that the nodes and therefore their adjacencies are relatively static, for scalable packet delivery in static wireless networks. Under BAF, each packet carries a blacklist, a minimal set of degraded-quality links encountered along its path, and the next hop is determined based on both its destination and blacklist. BAF provides loop-free delivery of packets to reachable destinations regardless of the number of degraded links in the network. We evaluate the performance of BAF and show that it is not only reliable but also scalable.