Connectivity Based Energy Efficient Opportunistic Robust Routing for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) consist of many sensor nodes that are randomly distributed in the environment to gather information. In MWSNs the transmission path is affected due to node mobility and node failures. Routing protocols in MWSNs must adjust to topology changes and should determine the path with minimum overheads. Dynamic nature of opportunistic routing strategy is observed to be more suitable for MWSNs. In this paper, a connectivity based energy efficient opportunistic robust (CBEEOR) routing protocol is designed and implemented for MWSNs. CBEEOR design involves algebraic connectivity, prioritized forwarder list for selecting relay node for data forwarding. A back-off time mechanism is implemented to seek cooperation of neighbourhood nodes for forwarding the packets in case the node on the existing path becomes unavailable or fails. This mechanism also ensures coordination among neighbouring nodes. The performance of CBEEOR is compared with both energy efficient opportunistic routing (EEOR) and optimal opportunistic forwarding (OOF), it is observed that CBEEOR fares by 25 and 6 % compared to EEOR and OOF respectively for energy efficiency. CBEEOR also shows better performance for packet delivery, network overheads and end-to-end delay compared to EEOR as well as OOF, making it also suitable for MWSNs with intermittent connectivity.