An Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based on Stable Ideology

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), traditional routing protocols send packets along pre-determined paths which are vulnerable in dealing with unreliable and unpredictable wireless medium. The main difference between the opportunistic routing and the traditional routing is that the former can employ several lossy broadcast links to support a reliable transmission. In order to improve the performance of opportunistic routing, nowadays, the tendency is to blend the idea of stable routing into opportunistic routing algorithms more or less. Just based on this ideology, this paper presents a stable ideology-based opportunistic routing (SIOR) for MANETs. Different from the existing protocols for MANETs, in SIOR, the stable ideology is infused into every step. In this paper, SIOR is described in detail around three issues of opportunistic routing. The first issue is how to select the forwarders among the neighbors; the second one is how to communicate among these forwarders to select a relay; the last one is how and when to relay the packets. The novel contribution of this paper is in dealing with the third issue. The ultimate target is to adapt SIOR to the mobility of MANETs. And then, the theory analysis is depicted on the basis of probability theory to compare SIOR with several relevant mechanisms. Finally, we have implemented simulation experiments. The simulation results show SIOR has prominent performance than other relevant protocols.