Position Based Opportunistic Routing for Robust Data Delivery in MANETs

Traditional MANET routing protocols are quite susceptible to link failure as well as vulnerable to malicious node attack. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol called Position based Opportunistic Routing (POR) which takes full advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless channel and opportunistic forwarding. The data packets are transmitted as a way of multicast (which is actually implemented by MAC interception) with multiple forwarders. A forwarder list determined by previous hop according to local position information is inserted into the IP header and the candidates take turn to forward the packet based on a predefined orders. This redundancy and randomness make it quite efficient and robust. In addition, inherited from position based routing, POR's control overhead is almost negligible which justifies its good scalability. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that POR not only achieves outstanding performances in normal situations but also yields excellent resilience in hostile environments.