Performance evaluation of opportunistic routing protocols

Abstract

Opportunistic routing may achieve significant performance gain under lossy wireless links or in scenarios of mobile ad hoc networks, where end-to-end connectivity is not always available. Instead of deterministically choosing one node to forward a packet to, the network layer selects a set of candidate nodes and then only one of them will be chosen dynamically as the actual forwarder based on the instantaneous channel conditions and node availability at the moment of transmission. Many protocols have been proposed and most of them are studied in specific simulation environments or real-world testbeds, and no systematic analysis has been given about the integrative performance of different protocols.