Abstract—During the past few years Opportunistic Routing (OR) gained a lot of attention as a way to improve the performance of wireless multi-hop Ad-hoc networks and wireless sensor networks. OR takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications to improve transmission reliability and throughput by forwarding data through a set of paths instead of one best path. In this paper we demonstrate the efficacy of OR by comparing it with traditional wireless routing protocols. Concurrently we also outline several vital design issues that needs to be considered by OR protocols to make it more effective and deployable. Finally, based on our extensive analysis we provide a generic framework to develop OR protocols for wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks.
Index Terms—Forwarder list, opportunistic routing, prioritization, selection
The authors are with the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India (e-mail: arka@iitp.ac.in; ashok@iitp.ac.in).
Cite: Arka Prokash Mazumdar and Ashok Singh Sairam, "Opportunistic Routing: Opportunities and Challenges," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 247-252, 2012.