Opportunistic routing with in-network aggregation for duty-cycled WSNs with delay requirements

This paper proposes an opportunistic routing protocol for wireless sensor networks that works on top of an asynchronous duty-cycling medium access control (MAC) protocol. The proposed protocol is designed for applications that are not real-time but still have some requirements on packet delay. The main idea is that if a packet has time to spare, it can wait on a node hoping that it can be aggregated with other packets, resulting in reduced number of transmissions. The forwarders and the packet hold time depend on the energy status of nodes in the network. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves longer network lifetime compared to the other state-of-the-art protocols, while satisfying application delay requirements.