A Light-Weight Opportunistic Forwarding Protocol with Optimized Preamble Length for Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensed information is expected to be reliably and timely delivered to a sink in an ad-hoc way. However, it is challenging to achieve this goal because of the highly dynamic topology induced from asynchronous duty cycles and temporally and spatially varying link quality among nodes. Currently some opportunistic forwarding protocols have been proposed to address the challenge. However, they involve complicated mechanisms to determine the best forwarder at each hop, which incurs heavy overheads for the resource-constrained nodes. In this paper, we propose a light-weight opportunistic forwarding (LWOF) scheme. Different from other recently proposed opportunistic forwarding schemes, LWOF employs neither historical network information nor a contention process to select a forwarder prior to data transmissions. It confines forwarding candidates to an optimized area, and takes advantage of the preamble in low-power-listening (LPL) MAC protocols and dual-channel communication to forward a packet to a unique downstream node towards the sink with a high probability, without making a forwarding decision prior to data transmission. Under LWOF, we optimize LPL MAC protocol to have a shortened preamble (LWMAC), based on a theoretical analysis on the relationship among preamble length, delivery probability at each hop, node density and sleep duration. Simulation results show that LWOF, along with LWMAC, can achieve relatively good performance in terms of delivery reliability and latency, as a receiver-based opportunistic forwarding protocol, while reducing energy consumption per packet by at least twice.