A Comprehensive Survey on Opportunistic Routing Protocols for MANETs: Issues, Challenges and Future Directions

Opportunistic routing is the latest technique that uses the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium to increase the number of potential forwarding nodes in the network. This, in turn improves the delivery rate and reliability of data transmission in the network. Compared to all previous classes of routing protocols, opportunistic routing offers numerous advantages which is exploited by the latest applications for efficient communication and resource sharing in dynamic ad hoc networks. These applications provide dynamic communication in disaster recovery environments. The objective of this research work is to review and classify all the major opportunistic routing protocols proposed for dynamic ad hoc networks. Further the issues and challenges with each of these existing protocol is discussed and future research directions are put forward