A new supportive opportunistic routing scheme in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

All the data transmission over the wireless medium in the wireless networks is by broadcasting in nature, which is different from the Internet. Because of the broadcast nature, many opportunities based on overhearing can be used to enhance the data transmission ability in wireless network. Ex-OR is the first practical data forwarding scheme which tries to promote the data transmission ability by utilizing the broadcast nature in wireless mesh networks and the opportunistic data forwarding becomes a well-known term given by Ex-OR to name this kind of new data forwarding scheme. The basic idea in ExOR has triggered a great deal of derivations. However, almost all these derivations are proposed for wireless mesh networks or require the positioning service to support opportunistic data forwarding in the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). In our system, we propose a series of solutions to implement opportunistic data forwarding in more general MANETs, which is called Supportive Opportunistic Routing Scheme in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (SORS). We propose the small-scale retransmission to utilize the broadcast nature one step further than ExOR, and furthermore it helps us to enhance the efficiency and robustness of the opportunistic data forwarding in MANETs. We run computer simulations in Network Simulator 2 (ns-2), and the simulation results indicate that the proposed solutions work well to support opportunistic data forwarding in MANETs.