Routing issues in opportunistic networks

The opportunistic networking idea stems from the critical review of the research field on Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). After more than ten years of research in the MANET field, this promising technology still has not massively entered the mass market. One of the main reasons of this is nowadays seen in the lack of a practical approach to the design of infrastructure-less multi-hop ad hoc networks [186, 185]. One of the main approaches of conventional MANET research is to design protocols that mask the features of mobile networks via the routing (and transport) layer, so as to expose to higher layers an Internet-like network abstraction. Wireless networks' peculiarities, such as mobility of users, disconnection of nodes, network partitions, links' instability, are seen-as in the legacy Internet-as exceptions. This often results in the design of MANET network stacks that are significantly complex and unstable [107].