Performance evaluation of opportunistic routing protocols: a framework-based approach using OMNeT++

Opportunistic routing may achieve significant performance gain under lossy wireless links or in scenarios of mobile ad hoc networks, where end-to-end connectivity is not always available. Instead of deterministically choosing one node to forward a packet to, the network layer selects a set of candidate nodes and then only one of them will be chosen dynamically as the actual forwarder based on the instantaneous channel conditions and node availability at the moment of transmission. Many protocols have been proposed and most of them are studied in specific simulation environments or real-world testbeds, and no systematic analysis has been given about the integrative performance of different protocols. In our previous work, we have shown that different opportunistic routing protocols share many common functions and these general functions could be abstracted and decoupled into a framework of functional components, which might facilitate the development and evaluation of opportunistic routing protocols. In this paper, we extend our work and present initial evaluation results of the ExOR and MORE protocols using our simulation framework in OMNeT++. Our simulation results justify scenarios where opportunistic routing may perform better than traditional MANET routing.