Local cooperative relay for opportunistic data forwarding in mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract—Opportunistic data forwarding draws more and more attention in the research community of wireless network after the initial work ExOR was published. However, as far as we know, all traditional opportunistic data forwarding only use the nodes that are included in the forwarder list to participate in the forwarding process. In fact, if a node is not included in the forwarder list but it is in the direction from source node to destination node, when it successfully overhears some packets by opportunity, the node can be utilized in opportunistic data forwarding. In this paper, we propose local cooperative relay for opportunistic data forwarding in mobile ad-hoc networks. In general, three contributions we have in this paper, 1) we open more node to participate in the opportunistic data forwarding even though the nodes are not included in the forwarder list, 2) the local relay node is selected after it overhears some packets, which can bridge the vulnerable links in mobile networks, 3) a coordination procedure with a new scoring function is proposed in this paper, so we need no overhead to coordinate the local relay nodes. Index Terms—Opportunistic data forwarding, local relay, local retransmission, coordination, scoring function. I