Efficiency analysis of opportunistic routing protocol in wireless multi-hop networks

Opportunistic routing (OR) is widely regarded as a promising way to improve the transmission reliability in wireless multihop networks. However, additional overheads introduced by OR such as duplicate transmission and collision avoidance overhead degrade the transmission efficiency. In this paper, an analytical model based on open queueing network with markov chains is proposed to evaluate the efficiency. In the analysis, efficiency is expressed by time overhead including the average queue delay and the back off time to transmit. With the knowledge of delivery ratio, the closed form expressions of time overhead could be obtained. In order to validate rationality of the model, three typical ORs were analyzed based on the proposed model and at the same time a large number of simulation studies have been done. We observed that theoretical value of the proposed model coincides basically with the experimental data with the average error less than 5%.