Opportunistic Multihop Routing in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the networks in which many sensor nodes are deployed in the application area to form a network. The sensor nodes collect the information about physical or chemical phenomenon and transfer this information towards the base station for further processing. To accomplish the task of transferring data sensor nodes, we require the routing protocols. Routing protocols for WSN are used to find the best path for the establishment of communication in the networks. Routing in WSN is a challenging task due to the nature and abilities of sensor nodes in WSN like energy, communication architecture and deployment of nodes. Many researchers have proposed routing protocols of various categories like Data Centric Routing, Hierarchical Routing, Location-based Routing and Opportunistic Routing. The use of routing protocols depends on the requirements of applications of WSN and also the capabilities of sensor nodes. In order to achieve a high throughput in unreliable wireless links, Opportunistic Routing (OR) collaborate all the sensor nodes in the path while forwarding the data packets. Opportunistic Routing uses broadcast transmission to send packets through multiple relays. It achieves higher throughput than traditional routing. The main idea behind Opportunistic Routing is to select a subset of the nodes between source and the destination node and the node closest to the destination will first try to retransmit packets. This dissertation studies the properties, power consumption, end to end delay, throughput and protocol design about OR in multihop wireless networks.