Protocol for efficient opportunistic communication

In typical wireless networks, end-to-end routing is a usual way to deliver data packets from source nodes to destination nodes. In the case of link failures when no alternative route is found, the routing protocols will drop these packets. As a way to improve the packet delivery ratio, an integration of the store-carry-forward features with the traditional end-to-end communication has been already proposed. The existing solutions propose one-time only switching from one communication mode to another should the link failures occur. In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol to support the dynamic switch between the two modes of communication should the link conditions changed. That is, the protocol utilises the ability to buffer packets when end-to-end routes are not possible, and leverages the end-to-end routes whenever they become available to ensure performance. We evaluate the proposed protocol using a set of comprehensive simulation scenarios to systematically demonstrate its significant improvement in packet delivery over one of the best representative routing protocol for end-to-end routing.