Utility energy-based opportunistic routing for lifetime enhancement in wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime is a significant performance challenge for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as sensor nodes generally rely on limited power sources such as batteries. One solution is to reduce the overall energy consumption from the physical to application layers. However, the residual energy of nodes across a network can vary greatly due to differences in battery capacity, traffic, energy harvesting, and topology location. Therefore reducing overall energy consumption may still result in some nodes exhausting their energy resource much more rapidly and failing faster than others. In this paper, besides the energy efficiency, the optimization of energy consumption among nodes on the basis of residual energy is studied, in order to prolong the network lifetime. The concept utility energy is introduced to aid selection of relay candidates in the proposed opportunistic routing protocol (U-OR). Simulation results show that the U-OR protocol can prolong network lifetime by at least 260%. Furthermore, this low overhead protocol can be used in large-scale WSNs.