On energy efficiency of geographic opportunistic routing in lossy multihop wireless networks

Geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) is an emerging technique that can improve energy efficiency in lossy multihop wireless networks. GOR makes local routing decision by using nodes’ location information, and exploits the broadcast nature and spatial diversity of the wireless medium to improve the packet forwarding reliability. In this paper, our goal is to fully understand the principles and tradeoffs in GOR, thus provide insightful analysis and guidance to the design of more efficient routing protocols in multihop wireless networks. We propose a local metric, one-hop energy efficiency (OEE), to balance the packet advancement, reliability and energy consumption in GOR. We identify and prove important properties about GOR on selecting and prioritizing the forwarding candidates in order to maximize the expected packet advancement. Leveraging the proved properties, we then propose two localized candidate selection algorithms with O(N ³) running time to determine the forwarding candidate set that maximizes OEE, where N is the number of available next-hop neighbors. Through extensive simulations, we show that GOR applying OEE achieves better energy efficiency than the existing geographic routing and blind opportunistic routing schemes under different node densities and packet sizes.