A Novel Hybrid Opportunistic Scalable Energy Efficient Routing Design for Low Power, Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic Routing (OR) scheme increases the transmission reliability despite the lossy wireless radio links by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. However, OR schemes in low power Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) leads to energy drain in constrained sensor nodes due to constant overhearing, periodic beaconing for Neighbourhood Management (NM) and increase in packet header length to append priority wise sorted Forwarding Candidates Set (FCS) prior to data transmission. The focus of this work is to propose a hybrid opportunistic energy efficient routing design for large scale, low power and lossy WSN. This design avoids periodic 'hello' beacons for NM, limits constant overhearing and increase in packet header length. There are two modes of operation i) opportunistic ii) unicast mode. The sender node adopts opportunistic forwarding for its initial data packet transmission and instead of pre-computing the FCS, it is dynamically computed in a completely distributed manner. The nodes part of FCS based on cross layered multi-metrics and fuzzy decision logic determines its priority level to compute Dynamic Holding Delay (DHD) for effective timer coordination. The differentiated back off implementation along with DHD enables the higher priority candidate that had received data packet to forward the packet first and facilitates others to cancel its timer upon overhearing. The sender node switches to unicast mode for successive transmissions to achieve energy efficiency till link-level transmission error occur. Opportunistic mode is used as the first and last resort to increase the transmission reliability. Simulation results in NS2 show significant increase in Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), decrease in both average energy consumption per node and Normalized Energy Consumption (NEC) per packet in comparison with existing protocols.