Opportunistic routing explicitly takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications by using a set of forwarders to opportunistically perform packet forwarding. A key issue in the design of opportunistic routing protocols is the forwarder list selection problem. This paper proposes a novel routing metric which shows the end-to-end throughput and a corresponding throughput oriented opportunistic routing forwarder-selecting algorithm throughput oriented forwarders selection (TOFS) through analyzing forwarding characteristics of forwarders. The algorithm puts forward a constraint mechanism that controls the number of forwarders by constraint of throughput for forwarders selection, achieving a better balance between number of forwarders and effective link stability by introducing the factor of transmission time. Simulation results show that the algorithm can improve the network end-to-end throughput effectively over existing methods.
