Local cooperative relay for opportunistic data forwarding in mobile ad-hoc networks

Opportunistic data forwarding draws more and more attention in the research community of wireless network after the initial work ExOR was published. However, as far as we know, all existing opportunistic data forwarding only use the nodes which are included in the forwarder list in the entire forwarding progress. In fact, even if a node is not a listed forwarder in the forwarder list, but it is on the direction from source node to destination node, and when it successfully overhears some packets by opportunity, the node actually can be utilized in the opportunistic data forwarding progress. In this paper, we propose the local cooperative relay for opportunistic data forwarding in mobile ad-hoc networks. In general, three contributions we have in this paper, 1) we open more node to participate in the opportunistic data forwarding even though the nodes are not included in the forwarder list, 2) we propose the procedure to select the best local relay node, namely the helper-node, from many candidates but require no inner communication between them, 3) the helper-node is selected just when it is needed, and the such real time selection can tolerate and bridge vulnerable links in mobile networks.