An opportunistic routing with improved node forwarding mechanism

Opportunistic routing protocol is proposed for broadcast and lossy characteristics existing in wireless multi-hop networks. Compared with traditional routing protocols, opportunistic routing protocol can bring higher data transmission abilities. Traditional opportunistic routing protocols have some problems, such as too large forwarding candidates set, too high protocol calculation expense and possible loops in its transmission paths. These problems limit the decrease of protocol calculation expense and the raise of protocol transmission abilities. We improved the selection process of forwarding candidates set (a candidate set of forwarding nodes) and the establishment of forwarding node in the node forwarding mechanism of opportunistic routing, then proposed a novel opportunistic routing protocol with improved node forwarding mechanism named IFOR (Improved Forwarding Opportunistic Routing). Experiments and analysis show that, compared with those opportunistic routing protocols which are based on the traditional node forwarding mechanism, IFOR can reduce protocol computing overhead and raise end-to-end packet delivery ratio in data transmissions.