Opportunistic wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently been proposed as solutions for many remote monitoring problems. Many such problems, including environmental monitoring, involve large deployment scenarios with lower-than-average node density, as well as a long time scale and limited budgets.

The use of opportunistic communications, while increasing in popularity, is still limited, due in part to some uncertainty that still exists regarding its performance in real-world conditions. This paper tries to assess the real performance of an opportunistic routing implementation in a physical setting, by comparing it with its expected performance, determined by a simplified theoretical model.