The Effect Of Acknowledgements On Performance Of Opportunistic Routing Protocols

Opportunistic Network (OppNets) is one of the latest evolution of mobile ad-hoc networks, which consists of highly mobile nodes prone to frequent disconnections. These networks have little to no infrastructure and are generally sparse. As such, no end-to-end path may exist between the source and the destination. These networks use the above mentioned characteristics as means of data transfer as opposed to a hindrance, and therefore routing in OppNets is a paradigm shift from that in traditional wireless networks. Many of the proposed routing protocols for OppNets rely on some kind of flooding, but since the nodes in OppNets have limited resources, it is imperative that the flooding must be controlled. This paper observes the effects of adding an acknowledgment system to various proposed routing protocols in order to prevent already delivered messages from persisting in the network, thus reducing the total network congestion.