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.

Void Aware Position Based Opportunistic Routing for QoS in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The unique anywhere, anytime wireless communication support offers, tremendous potential for the next generation of applications in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET). The Quality of Service (QoS) has been the ever demanding task of wireless communication to satisfy the application requirements. Geographical routing employs a greedy forwarding technique to deliver the packets to the destination and to owe the communication void, it fails to render the expected level of QoS. Opportunistic routing technique effectively utilizes the advantages of broadcasting nature of the wireless medium and selects a set of forwarding candidates instead of relying on a greedy node. To improve the efficiency of QoS routing in sparse and highly dynamic network topology, this paper proposes the Void-Aware Position based Opportunistic Routing (VAPOR). The VAPOR maintains 2-hop neighbor information to take a routing decision, but it is limited to 1-hop information when the node density is high. It efficiently balances the storage overhead and communication delay due to void and it increases the network throughput even under a sparse network. To provide a certain assurance level for packet reachability, VAPOR decides the potential forwarders based on the forwarding probability that measures link stability, capacity, and connectivity factor. It adaptively favors a path that avoids frequent link failure and unreliable link usage. By limiting the propagation area of duplicate packets, VAPOR reduces wastage of network resources, and ittakes the advantage of concurrent batch forwarding to avoid further duplication and unnecessary delay.

Utilizing the dropped packets for data delivery in VANETs

Timely and cost-efficient multi-hop data delivery among vehicles is essential for vehicular ad-hoc networks （VANETs）, and various routing protocols are envisioned for infrastructure-less vehicle-to-vehicle （V2V） communications. Generally, when a packet （or a duplicate） is delivered out of the routing path, it will be dropped. However, we observe that these packets （or duplicates） may also be delivered much faster than the packets delivered along the original routing path. In this paper, we propose a novel tree based routing scheme （TBRS） for ultilizing the dropped packets in VANETs. In TBRS, the packet is delivered along a routing tree with the destination as its root. And when the packet is delivered out its routing tree, it won＇t be dropt immediately and will be delivered for a while if it can arrive at another branch of the tree. We conduct the extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of TBRS based on the road map of a real city collected from Google Earth. The simulation results show that TBRS can outperform the existing protocols, especially when the network resources are limited.