An Energy Efficient Opportunistic Routing Metric for Wireless Sensor Networks

Objectives: Opportunistic Routing (OR) algorithms depends on metric design applied to the forwarder selection and prioritization. The objective is to define new OR metric, which reduces energy consumption in WSN. Methods/Statistical Analysis: In Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), sensor nodes have been supplied with a small amount of energy, using small size battery. Opportunistic Routing (OR) can minimize energy consumption by reducing delay and providing real time data delivery. OR reduces number of retransmissions in network by increasing the number of tentative forwarders. But most of the OR algorithms depends on metric design applied to the forwarder candidate selection and prioritization. Findings: In this paper, a new energy aware opportunistic routing metric called as Energy Depletion Factor (EDF) is proposed for WSN. This metric takes into consideration energy as well as delay. This metric can directly be used with existing opportunistic routing protocols. This metric extends the lifetime of the network by distributing energy consumption load equally in the network. It tells the routing algorithm that which forwarder node is having what impact on its battery life. EDF is local opportunistic routing metric, which reduces end-to-end delay in the network and also increases the network lifetime. To calculate EDF, the concept of residual energy of each node has been used. Application/Improvements: This metric can directly be used with existing opportunistic routing protocols. Simulation results presented the improvement of network lifetime and throughput by using EDF as a routing metric in WSN.