Enhancing delay-based packet forwarding schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been recognized as a key technology in shaping tomorrow´s world. To assure reliable and cost-effective forwarding of data, opportunistic schemes were explored. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of delay-based opportunistic schemes in WSNs and then propose a mechanism to overcome their drawbacks. The proposed idea has the merits of minimizing the time for time-critical applications and/or the cost for energy-critical applications. The idea was implemented in TinyOS and evaluated in TOSSIM. Simulation results prove its capacities in enhancing delay-based schemes with virtually no extra cost in computing demand, memory usage and communication overhead.