Contention‐based geographic forwarding in asynchronous duty‐cycled wireless sensor networks

In asynchronous duty‐cycled wireless sensor networks, it is desirable that the data forwarding scheme is adaptive to the dynamics caused by the uncertainty of sensor nodes’ working schedules. Contention‐based forwarding is designed to adapt to the dynamic environments. In this work, we are interested in the contention‐based geographic forwarding (CGF) for two asynchronous duty‐cycling (ADC) models, which we refer to as uninterruptible ADC (U‐ADC) and interruptible ADC (I‐ADC). We propose a new residual time‐aware routing metric for CGF in the I‐ADC model and present a residual time‐aware forwarding scheme using this metric. We evaluate the performance of CGF in both asynchronous duty‐cycling models. Simulation results show that CGF in the U‐ADC model provides a shorter delivery delay while suffering from a high sender effective duty cycle problem. CGF in the I‐ADC model incurs a very long data delivery delay, but it can achieve a good load balancing among nodes. It is also demonstrated that the proposed residual time‐aware forwarding scheme lowers the effects of the performance degradation caused by the pure asynchronous duty‐cycling operation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.