EOpR: An opportunistic routing algorithm for ad-hoc networks

Nowadays, Multi-hop wireless networks have achieved lots of attention due to their ease of development, low cost, and other advantages. Wireless channels have broadcast nature, and a sent packet can be heard by the nodes in the sender's transmission range. This feature is used in opportunistic routing to forward the packets and to enhance the network efficiency. In most of the opportunistic routing algorithms, forwarder nodes are pre-selected by the source nodes. Forwarders should be coordinated for the packet forwarding and one of them is finally selected as the next hop. If the forwarder list is large, coordination's computational overhead will be high. A new Energy efficient opportunistic routing algorithm, named EOpR is presented in this paper that selects the candidate nodes on the packets' fly. This selection is based on the region and the nodes' residual energy. Candidate nodes set a timer and the one whose timer expires first is selected as the next hop. Simulation results showed higher network performance in the terms of network's lifetime and also throughput compared to ROMER. The number of duplicate packets also decreases in EOpR.