Opportunistic routing with in-network aggregation for asynchronous duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

We propose an opportunistic routing protocol for wireless sensor networks designed to work on top of an asynchronous duty-cycled MAC. Opportunistic routing can be very effective when used with asynchronous duty-cycled MAC because expected waiting time of senders—when they stay on active mode and transmit packet streams—is significantly reduced. If there are multiple sources, energy consumption can be reduced further through in-network aggregation. The idea proposed in this paper is to temporarily increase duty cycle ratio of nodes holding packets, in order to increase chance of in-network aggregation and thus reduce energy consumption and extend network lifetime. In the proposed protocol called opportunistic routing with in-network aggregation (ORIA), whenever a node generates a packet or receives a packet to forward, it waits for a certain amount of time before transmitting the packet. Meanwhile, the node increases its duty cycle ratio, hoping that it receives packets from other nodes and aggregate them into a single packet. Simulation results show that ORIA saves considerable amount of energy compared to general opportunistic routing protocols, as well as tree-based protocols.