Opportunistic Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Research on wireless sensor network (WSN) has mainly involved the use of a portable and limited power source, namely batteries, to power the sensors. Without energy, a sensor is essentially useless and can not contribute to the utility of the network as a whole. As a result, considerable research effort has been devoted to designing energy efficient networking protocols to maximize network life. For this reason, a new routing concept called opportunistic routing has emerged whose objective is to address the resource management problem in order to maximize the lifetime of the network. In other words, opportunistic routing is a new theme in the WSNs, as it is an approach to take into account the environment of a node as it is and not as perceived by the network. Our main objective in this work will be to present a new idea to calculate the list of candidates to minimize energy consumption and increased the life time of network. And we proposed a new opportunistic routing protocols called energy-efficient opportunistic routing using a new forward list (EEOR-FL) aiming to balance energy consumption and maximize the network lifetime. EEOR-FL uses a new method in order to to calculate the list of candidates. The obtained results indicate that EEOR-FL can effectively balance the energy consumption and therefore can lengthen the network lifetime.