Review and Analysis of Opportunistic Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN) there are sensor nodes which are connected wirelessly to communicate each other are scattered in the field of interest. These wireless sensor nodes gather information about the field or changes in the field like some physical or chemical phenomenon. After gathering the information sensors transmit this information toward a high capacity computer system called as base station or sink. Although the sensors always transfer data toward the base station, but there is a need of routing protocols which optimize the energy consumption of each node for sending and receiving data packets. Sensor nodes perform all the sensing, processing and communicating tasks by using battery power. Hence, if the communication route is not optimal than more energy will be wasted. To save the energy in the network the routing protocols must select energy efficient routes. Several researchers worked in this area and proposed routing protocols which can be categorized as data centric, hierarchical, location based and opportunistic routing. This paper presents the description of each routing category and will present a comparative analysis of opportunistic routing (OR) protocols for WSN. Opportunistic routing protocols take the advantage of broadcasting nature of wireless sensor nodes and involve all sensor nodes in the data forwarding process. The comparative analysis has been done on the basis of various parameters like power usage, data aggregation, and scalability. This paper helps to recognize the effect of opportunistic routing on working of WSN and also it helps to find out which protocol suited which application best.