Opportunistic and Cooperative Forwarding in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks with Light-Weight Proactive Source Routing

The multi-hop wireless network has drawn a great deal of attention in the research community. Within the long period after it was proposed, the routing and forwarding operations in the multi-hop wireless network remain to be quite similar to those in the multi-hop wired network or the Internet. However, 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. ExOR 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 ExOR 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 this thesis, we propose a series of solutions to implement opportunistic data forwarding in more general MANETs, which is called Cooperative Opportunistic Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (CORMAN). CORMAN includes three following important components. First, a new light-weight proactive source routing scheme PSR is proposed to provide source routing information in MANETs for both opportunistic data forwarding