An Efficient Opportunistic Routing Protocol with Low Latency for Farm Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) can accurately and timely obtain the production information of crops, and provide data basis for intelligent agriculture. The dynamic crop state and un-stable climate environment make it difficult to predict the connectivity probability of wireless links. Therefore, this paper studies an energy‐saving opportunity routing transmission strategy under the influence of dynamic link interaction. The protocol establishes an importance model based on algebraic connectivity to reduce the energy consumption of network key nodes. At the same time, based on the improved Bellman–Ford algorithm, a method of constructing candidate sets is studied. It converts the opportunistic routing transmission cost of farm WSN into anycast link cost and the remaining opportunistic path cost affected by energy consumption. The priority queue is used to determine the nodes participating in the iteration, thereby reducing the computational overhead. The protocol also designs a backoff strategy considering the current residual energy to select the only forwarding node and reduce the unnecessary packet copies in the transmission process. Simulation results show that the studied method is superior to the existing opportunistic routing schemes in terms of packet overhead, network lifetime, energy consumption, and packet delivery rate.