QoS Aware Geographic Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

QoS routing is an important research issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially for mission-critical monitoring and surveillance systems which requires timely and reliable data delivery. Existing work exploits multipath routing to guarantee both reliability and delay QoS constraints in WSNs. However, the multipath routing approach suffers from a significant energy cost. In this work, we exploit the geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) for QoS provisioning with both end-to-end reliability and delay constraints in WSNs. Existing GOR protocols are not efficient for QoS provisioning in WSNs, in terms of the energy efficiency and computation delay at each hop. To improve the efficiency of QoS routing in WSNs, we define the problem of efficient GOR for multiconstrained QoS provisioning in WSNs, which can be formulated as a multiobjective multiconstraint optimization problem. Based on the analysis and observations of different routing metrics in GOR, we then propose an Efficient QoS-aware GOR (EQGOR) protocol for QoS provisioning in WSNs. EQGOR selects and prioritizes the forwarding candidate set in an efficient manner, which is suitable for WSNs in respect of energy efficiency, latency, and time complexity. We comprehensively evaluate EQGOR by comparing it with the multipath routing approach and other baseline protocols through ns-2 simulation and evaluate its time complexity through measurement on the MicaZ node. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the GOR approach for QoS provisioning in WSNs. EQGOR significantly improves both the end-to-end energy efficiency and latency, and it is characterized by the low time complexity.