Efficient Greedy Forwarding Scheme Using Back-Off Intervals in Wireless Sensor Networks

Greedy forwarding is the main component of geographic routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As it uses 1-hop local information for packet forwarding, it does not need to maintain routing table, having low overhead and high scalability. Early proposed greedy forwarding schemes do not consider link quality, so the schemes experience performance degradation from unreliability of links in real environment. To solve the problem other schemes have been proposed, still they have either asymmetry link problem or high overhead from the use of global information. In the paper, a Back-off Interval Greedy Forwarding scheme (BI-GF) is proposed to solve the problems while maintaining the benefits of greedy forwarding. In BI-GF, each neighbor node calculates BI using 2-hop information, and based on that, data packet is forwarded. In the simulation result, BI-GF improves delivery rate up to 46% and energy efficiency up to 37% compared with PRR×Distance greedy forwarding.