Managing Node Collaboration Effectively in Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks for Efficient Data Routing

Abstract

As the cost of nodes in wireless multihop sensor networks is decreasing, the density of the network as a whole is increasing due to the deployment of many such sensor nodes that multiplies network connectivity. In this paper, we study the technique of collaborative forwarding to improve the routing connectivity of such networks. Collaborative routing takes advantage of the density of the network to form associations between small connected clusters to relay packets to the next node. The proposed routing scheme, called Controlled Collaborative Optimal Routing (CoCORo), is a novel technique to use opportunistic collaborative communication on top of Trajectory Based Forwarding (TBF) [5] in order to achieve more energy-efficient routing, particularly in dense wireless multihop networks. It is similar to source routing in the sense that the source determines the optimal path consisting of the active nodes and also embeds the trajectory in the packet header. This is done to reduce the energy and the path length. The adjacent non-transmitting active nodes and the low-power-listening mode nodes are dynamically allocated for a controlled opportunistic collaborative communication along the selected path. The scheme successfully improves reliability and capacity gain both by a factor proportional to the number of collaborating nodes. Our work shows that CoCORo significantly decreases the overall energy requirement for the wireless multihop network, and thus provides significant connectivity gain. We focus on analytical techniques to prove the results, and confirm them by performing a numerical evaluation.