Optimal power control based opportunistic routing in linear wireless sensor networks

The design of routing protocol for the linear wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem due to its characteristics of multi-hop transmission and limited energy resource. In this paper, an opportunistic routing is discussed for a linear network topology with the aid of power control, which can be proved to be an effective means for energy saving. A noticeable phenomenon is that transmitting with higher power increases the packet delivery probability and transmission range so that more candidate nodes are available to participate in the packet forwarding process, which could improve network performance effectively. However, the more candidate nodes and the increase of transmitting power both lead to excessive energy consumption. Thus, an optimal power control based opportunistic routing (OPC-OR) is designed to make a compromise between the enhancement of overall network performance and the decrease of the total energy consumption. Compared with some existing opportunistic routing protocols, the experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.