Data Correlation Aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Opportunistic routing has been a promising routing paradigm for the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) due to the broadcast and lossy characteristics of wireless channels. In this paper, we propose a Correlation Aware opportunistic Routing protocol CAR, which combines spatial correlation based data aggregation and opportunistic routing for achieving improved routing performance. The design behind CAR is to fully take advantage of the characteristic of spatial correlation among data sensed by neighbor sensor nodes and opportunistic nature for data reception in packet delivery in wireless channels. For this purpose, CAR first aggregate correlated data at selected forwarder and then opportunistically forward aggregated data toward the intended destination to reduce data redundancy. Extensive simulations show that CAR outperforms existing work in terms of data delivery cost and overall energy consumption.