Opportunistic routing transmission coordination using bit map

Opportunistic routing employs transmission coordination mechanism (TCM) to reduce the total number of packet transmissions so as to improve end-to-end throughput. Existing paradigms use batch map to record the progress of packets transmitted in batch mode towards to destination, and then achieve distributed transmission coordination by exchanging batch map among candidate forwarders. However, the per-packet overhead created by embedding batch map in each packet counteracts the benefit of opportunistic routing partially. This paper used bit map to replace batch map, and proposed bit map-based TCM. By reducing the communication and computational overhead of transmission coordination of opportunistic routing, the proposed bit map-based TCM can improve the end-to-end performance of opportunistic routing. Simulation results showed the average end-to-end throughput gain of bit-string-based TCM is 6.4%, and the proposed TCM reduced the computational overhead of transmission coordination from O(N) to O(1) comparing with batch map-based TCM.