Improving the performance of opportunistic routing using min-max range and optimum energy level for relay node selection in wireless sensor networks

Opportunistic routing is an emerging routing technology that was proposed to overcome the drawback of unreliable transmission, especially in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Over the years, many forwarder methods were proposed to improve the performance in opportunistic routing. However, based on existing works, the findings have shown that there is still room for improvement in this domain, especially in the aspects of latency, network lifetime, and packet delivery ratio. In this work, a new relay node selection method was proposed. The proposed method used the minimum or maximum range and optimum energy level to select the best relay node to forward packets to improve the performance in opportunistic routing. OMNeT++ and MiXiM framework were used to simulate and evaluate the proposed method. The simulation settings were adopted based on the benchmark scheme. The evaluation results showed that our proposed method outperforms in the aspect of latency, network lifetime, and packet delivery ratio as compared to the benchmark scheme.