A New Loop-Free Proactive Source Routing Scheme for Opportunistic Data Forwarding in Wireless Networks

Opportunistic data forwarding (ODF) has drawn much attention in wireless networking research in recent years. The effectiveness of ODF in wireless networks is heavily depended on the choice of proper routing protocols which can provide effective source routing services. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol named PSR for ODF in mobile ad-hoc networks. PSR is featured by proactive source routing, loop-free, and extremely small routing overhead. Compared to existing routing protocols, there is no need to timestamp routing updates in PSR and the update messages are harmoniously integrated into the tree structure, so that the overhead can be significantly reduced.