Common Opportunistic Routing and Forwarding

Most of the existing routing schemes for opportunistic forwarding either rely on a priori known topology information, or provide explicit protocol information in the data packet header. In this paper, we present a routing protocol for opportunistic forwarding that dynamically create candidate priority forwarding lists without the need for any explicit control information in data packet headers, and determines and distributes link probability information. The routing protocol is both modular and powerful enough to be used as the routing information creating entity for most existing opportunistic schemes, as well as future new schemes. These properties makes our protocol an ideal candidate for a common opportunistic forwarding reference framework. We use our framework to develop a Multi-Rate Opportunistic Routing with Congestion Diversity (MORCD) protocol for routing packets in congested networks and utilize availability of multiple rates to further improve throughput. We show that the type of routing scheme optimal for a certain scenario depends on how much diversity the network topology is able to provide, the amount of fading, and the amount of traffic as well as interference that exists in the network. By having a modular routing protocol, it is therefore possible to configure the protocol to use the most appropriate scheme and make it work efficiently under many different situations and scenarios.