Energy Aware Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been increasingly considered an attractive solution for a plethora of applications, such as unattended event monitoring and tracking. Energy consumption is one of the looming challenges that threaten the successful deployment of these networks, especially when they are designed to operate unattended for long periods of time. In this paper, we are introducing an Energy-Aware Opportunistic Routing protocol (EAOR), for Wireless Sensor Networks, which keeps a balance between the Quality of Service (QoS) and the energy efficiency. The main objective is to maximize network lifespan without increasing the packet delay. We conduct experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol against existing ones, in terms of throughput and energy consumption. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed protocol can deliver better energy distribution, extends the network lifetime up to 25% compared to simple opportunistic routing protocols and decreases the total energy consumption by 35% compared to traditional routing.