Opportunistic routing (OR) uses the reception diversity to increase the network throughput. Recently, it has been shown that neglecting link correlation (LC) deteriorates the performance of OR protocols. Consequently, current OR proposals prioritize independent forwarders over correlated forwarders. In this letter, we proposed a new concept, called link synergy (LS), and showed that it increases OR performance in comparison with LC-aware protocols. In particular, OR combination with LS increases the performance by 166% and 11% compared with OR and OR + LC, respectively. In addition, applying LS to OR routing protocols that use network coding (NC) increases the performance by 16% and 9% compared with OR + NC and OR + NC + LC.
