Abstract
Because of the number of candidate nodes in opportunistic routing is too large, this paper proposed an estimation method on the number of candidate nodes based on distance (DBNCE). This method sets the number of candidate nodes for each node which participates in forwarding data package according to the distance between current node and the destination, also combines the two factors: network density and the number of neighbor nodes in current node. Simulation results show that using DBNCE in opportunistic routing will reduce the number of candidate nodes effectively while guarantee the rate of data transmission, and improve the performance of the network.