Opportunistic Routing for Disruption Tolerant Networks

Opportunistic networks represent one of the most interesting evolution of MANET paradigm. Generally speaking, opportunistic networks enable user communication in environments where disconnection and reconnection are likely and link performance is extremely non stationary. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol, based on the opportunistic routing paradigm, able to assure connectivity in ad hoc networks characterized by high link dynamic, namely in Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs). By means of numerical analysis, a comparison with both traditional and collaborative routing protocols has been state showing that our proposal is able to provide end-to-end connectivity in DTNs, taking advantage by the link dynamic.