Quality Aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol with Adaptive Coordination Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

For ad-hoc wireless sensor networks (WSN), multi-hop routing has been adopted in order to save communication power consumption and to increase network lifetimes. In contrast to traditional multi-hop routing, the Opportunistic Routing (OR) protocol provides an alternative and efficient method for exploiting the spatial and temporal characteristics of wireless networks. One of the more important aspects of the OR protocol is its ability to coordinate between potential relays from each node. In a delay-based coordination scheme, potential performance deficiencies especially with respect to end-to-end delays may occur. In this paper, we highlight an enhanced adaptive (E-adaptive) coordination mechanism for low power wireless sensor networks based on an improved opportunistic quality score first proposed in [1]. The ability to adapt the coordination procedure to variations in network connectivity is useful in satisfying quality of service (QoS) requirements for WSN applications using OR.