A Cooperative Approach for Opportunistic Routing In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperative Communication, a new research area, has revealed a recent origin in the wireless networks, which combines the link-quality and the broadcasting nature of the wireless channels. It is a pure network layer scheme that can be built on top of the wireless networking equipment. Nodes in the network use a lightweight proactive source routing protocol to determine a list of intermediate nodes that the data packets should follow en route to the destination. Here, when a data packet is broadcast by an upstream node and received by a downstream node further along the route, it continues its way from there and thus will arrive at the destination node sooner. This is achieved through cooperative data communication at the link and network layers. The CORMAN protocol was used for the purpose of cooperative communication, is implemented and observed significant performance improvement in varying mobile settings.