Routing Protocols for Opportunistic Networks

摘要

Opportunistic networks represent a kind of emerging technique of wireless networks in which network contacts are intermittent or links are extremely unstable and may break quickly. Under the circumstances, the intermediate nodes may exploit chance encounters to forward data, which is distinct from previous research works in conventional wireless networks. Therefore, the design of efficient routing strategies for opportunistic networks is a complicated task due to the absence of knowledge about the topological variety of networks. In this paper, the conception of the opportunistic networks is introduced firstly. Then, based on this knowledge, we investigate the theory of routing protocols of opportunistic networks in detail and analyze both merits and drawbacks of main existing schemes with respect to buffer management, estimation of link forwarding and encounter probability. Finally, the paper presents the possible research issues for opportunistic networks in the future.