ER: Energy Efficient Routing for Multi-hop Green Wireless Networks

Wireless communication consumes a significant amount of energy in wireless networks. Most multi-hop wireless routing protocols are adopted from wired network routing protocols and use pre-selected single or multiple minimum cost paths to forward data packets. However unlike wired networks, a wireless network has unique characteristics such as unreliable wireless links and multiple receivers associated with a single packet transmission. These particular characteristics of wireless network make it energy inefficient by using preselected paths to forward data packets. In this paper we propose a scalable, opportunistic, and energy efficient routing protocol (ER) that uses an opportunistic forwarding scheme to deliver control messages and data packets in a multi-hop wireless network. To further reduce the overhead of control message, we introduce a novel greedy forwarding algorithm and an efficient self-suppression scheme. Extensive analysis and simulations show that ER can provide high packet delivery ratio and effectively reduce redundant packet transmissions which results in less energy consumption.