Selecting Optimal Forwarder Based on Energy and Trust for Routing in WSN

Energy efficiency is one critical issue for sensor networks because many sensors are equipped with batteries that have limited life time. This paper is focused on Opportunistic routing which is a recent technique that achieves high throughput in the face of lossy wireless links. The existing opportunistic routing protocol, ExOR (ties the MAC with routing) and MORE (MAC-independent) did not explore the benefit of selecting the appropriate forwarding list to minimize the energy cost. In this paper we intend to propose a new protocol called OFETR (Selecting Optimal Forwarder based on Energy and Trust, for Routing) to address the problems of selecting and prioritizing forwarder list based on energy and trust value such that the network performance is optimized. We show how our approach maximizes the network life time in comparison with existing protocols. Saving the nodes energy leads to an increase in the node life in the network in comparison with the other protocols (EXOR and MORE). Furthermore, the protocol increase the security by using trustworthiness routing, reduces propagation delay and loss of packets. Experimental results show that the energy consumption of routing using OFETR is significantly lower than ExOR with random forwarder list and traditional distance vector routing protocols. Simulation results have been obtained by using NS2 simulator. From the results, the performance of OFETR is better compared to the other protocols as EXOR and MORE.