Research on Routing Protocols and Simulation Analysis for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are a kind of Ad Hoc networks that make use of meeting opportunities from mobile nodes to realize the network communication which doesn't need a full path between the source nodes and destination nodes. It’s tolerant in latency and network division. It’s a great challenge to design routing protocols in opportunistic networks in that the movements of nodes are uncertain leading to intermittent connection which make it hard to transmit message to its destination. However, the problems have also attracted more and more attention from researchers. Firstly, in this paper, we introduced the basic concept of opportunistic networks. Secondly we classified and interpreted routing protocols according to the infrastructure, scenario, forwarding mechanism etc. Thirdly, we carried out the computer simulation and analysis for opportunistic network routing protocols in aspect of message delivery ratio, network latency, routing overhead and the number of lost packets. Then we summarized the advantages and disadvantages of routing protocol and discussed its applicability. Finally we looked ahead the hotspot of recent routing protocols under opportunistic networks.