Performance of opportunistic routing in low duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose three variants of WSN routing protocol: i) basic-opportunistic, ii) opportunistic with delay and iii) opportunistic with backtracking. The main idea is that a node transmits its packet to the next awake node as long as this decreases the remaining distance to the sink. The two last variants allow a packet to be discarded or moved further away from the sink if necessary. The performance evaluation is carried out by simulations and with analytical model based on a Poisson rain model. The comparison is based i) probability of packet delivery, ii) end-to-end packet delay and iii) number of hops between the source and the sink node.