Mobile node aware opportunistic routing in dynamic wireless sensor network

Abstract

Opportunistic routing (OR) could adapt to dynamic wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because of its inherent broadcast nature. Most of the existing OR protocols focus on the variations of propagation environment which are caused by channel fading. However, a few works deal with the dynamic scenario with mobile nodes. In this paper, a mobile node (MN) aware OR (MN-OR) is proposed and applied to a WSN in the high-speed railway scenario where the destination node is deployed inside a high speed moving train, and the MN-OR not only considers the mobility of node but also utilizes the candidate waiting time induced by the timer-based coordination scheme. Specifically, to reduce the number of duplicate transmissions and mitigate the delay of information transmission, a new selection strategy of the candidate forwarders is presented. In addition, two priority assignment methods of the candidate forwarders are proposed for the general relay nodes (GRNs) and the rail-side nodes (RSNs) according to their different routing requirements. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MN-OR protocol can achieve better network performances compared with some existing routing schemes such as the well-known Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and the extremely opportunistic routing (ExOR) protocols.