Opportunistic routing protocols in wireless networks: A performance comparison

The broadcast nature of the wireless medium applied in Opportunistic Routing (OR) to improve the performance of wireless networks. OR protocols select a set of candidates as the next-hop forwarder. Each candidate can act as a potential forwarder if it receives the packet. Candidate selection is one of the main issues for OR protocols. In this paper, we implement and compare different ranges of OR protocols (simple, complex and optimum ones) in terms of different performance parameters using NS-2. The obtained results through extensive simulations show that OR improves the performance of network in different terms. Furthermore, our results provide insights to the use of each opportunistic routing protocols in different scenarios.