Design of forwarder list selection scheme in opportunistic routing protocol

Unlike traditional wireless routing protocols which use a single fixed path, opportunistic routing explicitly takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications by using a set of forwarders to opportunistically perform packet forwarding. A key issue in the design of opportunistic routing protocols is the forwarder list selection problem. In this paper we establish a general theory for analyzing the forwarder list selection problem, and develop an optimal solution, the minimum transmission selection (MTS) algorithm, which minimizes the expected number of transmissions. Through extensive simulations using the MIT Roofnet dataset, we demonstrate that in more than 90% cases the MTS algorithm outperforms the forwarder selection scheme used in ExOR, the best known opportunistic routing protocol in the literature.