Experiments with ODYSSE: Opportunistic Duty cYcle Based Routing for Wireless Sensor nEtworks

In this paper, we propose, design and experiment an energy efficient protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) named Opportunistic Duty cYcle based routing protocol for wirelesS Sensor nEtworks (ODYSSE). The main key innovation of ODYSSE is that it judiciously makes use of three mechanisms. The first one is duty cycling which consists in randomly switching on/off transceivers to save energy. The second one is opportunistic routing in which the next hop is not rigidly fixed: any node closer to the destination might become a relay. The third one, is source coding using LDPC, Low-Density Parity-Check codes. With asynchronous duty cycling as a starting point, the above techniques fit perfectly, yielding a robust low complexity protocol for highly constrained nodes. ODYSSE is implemented and installed in an experimental testbed composed of 45 Arduino nodes communicating with IEEE 802.15.4 (XBee) modules deployed in the large-scale platform FIT IoT-LAB. Results show that the performance obtained is very satisfying in both following scenarios: high load (images) and light load (reporting of infrequent event).