Power control based cooperative opportunistic routing in wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes an approach called PC-CORP (Power Control based Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol) for WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks), providing robustness to the random variations in network connectivity while ensuring better data forwarding efficiency in an energy efficient manner. Based on the realistic radio model, we combine the region-based routing, rendezvous scheme, sleep discipline and cooperative communication together to model data forwarding by cross layer design in WSN. At the same time, a lightweight transmission power control algorithm called PC-AIMD (Power Control Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) is introduced to utilize the cooperation of relay nodes to improve the forwarding efficiency performance and increase the robustness of the routing protocol. In the simulation, the performance of PC-COPR is investigated in terms of the adaptation of variations in network connectivity and satisfying the QoS requirements of application.