EA-COR: An Environment Adaptive Clustering Opportunistic Routing Protocol of WSN

Generally, the radio channel quality of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is unstable in harsh environment. For instance, in maritime search and rescue, the nodes of WSN move dynamically, the topology changes with respect to the time and the communication link changes frequently as well. What is more, the given communication distance of nodes can limit the efficiency of routing. In view of these characteristics of wireless sensor networks in a harsh environment, environment adaptive clustering opportunistic routing protocol (EA-COR) is proposed in this paper to improve the unstable communication quality of harsh environment. EA-COR is based on the idea of clustering which combines with the advantages of opportunistic routing. Simulation results show that in a harsh environment EA-COR performs better than the traditional clustering routing and opportunistic routing in the aspects of network throughput, energy efficiency, and packet transmission efficiency.