Time-aware and energy-efficient opportunistic routing with residual energy collection in wireless sensor networks

In 1-dimensional queue wireless sensor networks, how to balance end-to-end latency and energy consumption is a challenging problem. However, traditional best path routing and existing opportunistic routing protocols do not address them well because relay hop counts are usually much more, and the link appears more unreliable compared with general mesh topology. In this work, we formulate these 2 problems as a multiobjective optimization problem. Specifically, we first classify network packets into types of time tolerant and time critical and introduce a residual energy collection mechanism of neighboring nodes for forwarder set selection. We then propose a time-aware and energy-efficient opportunistic routing protocol (TE-OR) to optimize energy consumption and to reduce latency for time-critical packets. We evaluate TE-OR by different parameters and compare it with existing protocols. The performance results show that TE-OR achieves a trade-off between energy consumption and time delay and balances energy consumption among nodes while guaranteeing the latency of time-critical packets is minimized.