PBFS: A technique to select forwarders in Opportunistic Routing

Opportunistic Routing (OR) is a class of routing protocol that exploits the broadcast nature of wireless network to improve routing efficiency. The primary step in OR is to select a group of nodes as forwarders and prioritize them. The current approach of selecting the forwarders is through simulation which does not always give the best results, select forwarders on diverse paths and can be compute intensive for large networks. In this paper we formulate the problem using OR algebra. We propose a forwarder selection scheme primary-brook forwarder selection (PBFS) that computes the forwarder list such that a particular network objective is maximized. The main criteria while selecting the forwarders is to ensure that adjacent forwarders can listen to each other. Analytical as well as empirical results show that our scheme requires less number of retransmission as compared to some of the popular OR protocols.