A Receiver-Based Opportunistic Forwarding Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

In mobile sensor networks, the mobility of nodes leads to frequent changes of network topology, therefore the communication links between source nodes and sink vary dynamically. The receiver based routing protocols do not need to establish global routing between source nodes and sink, but allow the neighbor nodes of the sender to contend for the forwarding right under certain rules, and only the contention winner has the right to forward data. Existing receiver-based routing protocols can be applied to the mobile sensor networks, but they suffer from some disadvantages in the fields of forwarding priority calculation, data collisions, multicast suppression and routing void. A receiver based opportunistic forwarding protocol (ROF) was proposed in this paper. The ROF protocol optimized the forwarding priority calculation, and designed a dual-channel based forwarding right contention mechanism, which dealt with the data collision and multicast suppression problem better, and put forward an efficient mechanism for routing void bypass. The simulation results show that ROF is excellent in the aspects of communication consumption, forwarding delay and reliability.