Opportunistic Routing in Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic routing is widely known to have substantially better performance than unicast routing in wireless networks with lossy links. However, wireless sensor networks are usually duty cycled, that is, they frequently enter sleep states to ensure long network lifetime. This renders existing opportunistic routing schemes impractical, as they assume that nodes are always awake and can overhear other transmissions. In this article we introduce ORW, a practical opportunistic routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. ORW uses a novel opportunistic routing metric, EDC, that reflects the expected number of duty-cycled wakeups that are required to successfully deliver a packet from source to destination. We devise distributed algorithms that find the EDC-optimal forwarding and demonstrate using analytical performance models and simulations that EDC-based opportunistic routing results in significantly reduced delay and improved energy efficiency compared to traditional unicast routing. In addition, we evaluate the performance of ORW in both simulations and testbed-based experiments. Our results show that ORW reduces radio duty cycles on average by 50% (up to 90% on individual nodes) and delays by 30% to 90% when compared to the state-of-the-art.

Highly-Efficient Bulk Data Transfer for Structured Dissemination in Wireless Embedded Network Systems

“…Many recent works [36,37,38] have observed that the packet errors are most likely to be bursty, i.e., the erroneous packets are often consecutive. As the key of network coding is to generate the non-linear combinations of the native packets, the consecutiveness poses new chance for lightweight error recovery code.…”

Energy efficient routing protocols for wireless sensor networks: comparison and future directions

“…Ghadimi et al had proposed opportunistic routing in wireless sensor networks (ORW) routing protocol targeting applications with low duty cycles [11]. The protocol maintains a so called expected duty cycle (EDC) metric for all the neighboring nodes.…”

ICEMAN: A Practical Architecture for Situational Awareness at the Network Edge

“…This line of research has been advanced in the European Framework Program, which has developed a wide range of routing algorithms that can naturally deal with mobility and exploit social relationships [31,30,20]. Service discovery [13] and opportunistic routing [17] for low duty-cycle lossy wireless sensor networks have been recently studied. A range of innovative approaches to security and metadata privacy has also been developed in this project [34,35,5].…”