RGF: Receiver-based Greedy Forwarding for Energy Efficiency in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Greedy forwarding is the key mechanism of geographic routing and is one of the protocols used most commonly in wireless sensor networks. Greedy forwarding uses 1-hop local information to forward packets to the destination and does not have to maintain the routing table, and thus it takes small overhead and has excellent scalability. However, the signal intensity reduces exponentially with the distance in realistic wireless sensor network, and greedy forwarding consumes a lot of energy, since it forwards the packets to the neighbor node closest to the destination. Previous proposed greedy forwarding protocols are the sender-based greedy forwarding that a sender selects a neighbor node to forward packets as the forwarding node and hence they cannot guarantee energy efficient forwarding in unpredictable wireless environment. In this paper, we propose the receiver-based greedy forwarding called RGF where one of the neighbor nodes that received the packet forwards it by itself. In RGF, sender selects several energy efficient nodes as candidate forwarding nodes and decides forwarding priority of them in order to prevent unnecessary transmissions. The simulation results show that RGF improves delivery rate up to maximum 66.8% and energy efficiency, 60.9% compared with existing sender-based greedy forwarding. Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, geographic routing, greedy forwarding, unreliability, energy-efficiency