MOR: Multichannel Opportunistic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) share the 2.4 GHz ISM band with a number of wireless technologies, such as WiFi and Bluetooth. This and external interference from electrical devices, such as, for example, microwaves, deteriorate the reliability of many routing protocols in WSNs. Multichannel communication strategies allow routing protocols to provide reliability in presence of interference. In this paper, we propose robust, reliable, and energyefficient Multichannel Opportunistic Routing (MOR) for WSNs. MOR employs both opportunistic routing and opportunistic multichannel hopping strategies, in order to improve the robustness of the network to interference. Furthermore, it empowers MOR to take advantage of not only the spatial and temporal diversities as traditional opportunistic routing in WSNs does but also the frequency diversity. We implement MOR in Contiki and conduct extensive experiments in the FlockLab testbed. Under interference MOR provides an end-to-end packet delivery ratio (PDR) of more than 98%, while other protocols such as, for example, ORPL, obtain a PDR of merely 25%. Additionally, MOR’s duty cycle stays below 2% for these settings and latency is less than 2 seconds. In interferencefree scenarios, MOR achieves a performance similar to our baseline protocol ORPL, with only an approximately 0.3% increment of the duty cycle.