A novel Tunable Opportunistic Routing Protocol for WSN Applications

The application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technologies in various engineering and scientific areas has seen a rapid growth in recent years. WSNs have been applied to monitoring, measuring, control and coordination in different areas like military applications, industrial environments, agriculture and more. Many WSN applications such as industrial applications require real-time communication between WSN nodes and demand reliable packet delivery. In addition, the energy consumption aspects of wireless nodes need to be carefully considered. In this paper we introduce a novel routing protocol for WSNs in real-time. Our protocol uses geographic information of sensor nodes and a tunable cost function for selecting intermediate relay nodes. This allows it to adapt to various network designs and application requirements. Our results show that the presented routing algorithm achieves highly reliable, near real-time delivery of data packets at improved energy efficiency. Keywords—Reliability; Void-Avoidance; Real-Time; Routing Protocols; Energy Consumption; Wireless Sensor Networks