Analysis of Batched Opportunistic Data Forwarding in Wireless Mesh Networks

The opportunistic forwarding paradigm is an emerging technology that takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications to compensate the channel unreliability. In this paper, we propose an analytical model based on Markov Chain to evaluate the performance of opportunistic forwarding. In our model, the network state is described by the combination of the packet advancement progress and the schedule of opportunistic forwarding, it could provide better understanding of the multi-packet transmissions in a network. This paper contains two simulation studies based on the iterative estimation and the random walk to show the transmission cost of the batched opportunistic data forwarding.