A performance study of hybrid protocols for opportunistic communications

Typically, many multi-hop wireless networks rely on routing protocols to form end-to-end routes to deliver data packets from the sources to the respective destinations. In the case of link failures occur due to interference or node mobility, these protocols will try to reroute. When no alternative route is found, packets will be dropped as a result. As a way to improve the packet delivery ratio, these protocols can be extended to support the store-carry-forward features. We propose a hybrid approach to enable dynamic switching between mode of communication according to the link conditions. This is different from other existing solutions where the switching occur only when the end-to-end route fails, and packets will be delivered using another communication mode for the rest of the routing path. In this paper, we present the implementation of incorporating the dynamic switching into two routing protocols (AODV and OLSR) and conduct a performance study for the two hybrid protocols in a number of simulation based scenarios.