A framework for opportunistic routing in multi-hop wireless networks

Opportunistic routing has recently been proposed to take advantage of the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the wireless medium and cope with unreliable transmissions. Within this "opportunistic routing hype", complex routing schemes with opportunistic features have been proposed, but their performance gains can not be clearly attributed to their opportunistic character, since they also include other strong optimization features applicable to classical routing. A goal of this work is to study how purely wireless primitives and design characteristics affect a routing scheme with opportunistic features and thus design a new such scheme. To this end we introduced a simple framework under which, through simulation, we defined the key elements of an adaptive probabilistic forwarding scheme. We show that it outperforms the opportunistic elements of two well-known opportunistic routing protocols: SOAR and Directed Transmission, in terms of delay and resource utilization, under varying channel error and misinformation conditions and due to its simplicity, the gains can be clearly attributed to its core features.