Energy-Efficient Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Opportunistic routing [2], [3] has been shown to improve the network throughput, by allowing nodes that overhear the transmission and closer to the destination to participate in forwarding packets, i.e., in forwarder list. The nodes in forwarder list are prioritized and the lower priority forwarder will discard the packet if the packet has been forwarded by a higher priority forwarder. One challenging problem is to select and prioritize forwarder list such that a certain network performance is optimized. In this paper, we focus on selecting and prioritizing forwarder list to minimize energy consumption by all nodes. We study both cases where the transmission power of each node is fixed or dynamically adjustable. We present an energy-efficient opportunistic routing strategy, denoted as EEOR. Our extensive simulations in TOSSIM show that our protocol EEOR performs better than the well-known ExOR protocol (when adapted in sensor networks) in terms of the energy consumption, the packet loss ratio, and the average delivery delay.