Technical Report: Multi-Carrier Position-Based Packet Forwarding Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a density-tolerant, relay-selection-free position-based packet forwarding protocol for wireless sensor networks, leveraging OFDM to reduce overhead and improve energy efficiency and latency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel relay forwarding protocol that eliminates relay selection, reducing overhead and enhancing performance in dense sensor networks.

Findings

Reduces relay selection overhead significantly.

Achieves faster data transmission with the same energy consumption.

Demonstrates improved efficiency through analytical and simulation results.

Abstract

Beaconless position-based forwarding protocols have recently evolved as a promising solution for packet forwarding in wireless sensor networks. However, as the node density grows, the overhead incurred in the process of relay selection grows significantly. As such, end-to-end performance in terms of energy and latency is adversely impacted. With the motivation of developing a packet forwarding mechanism that is tolerant to node density, an alternative position-based protocol is proposed in this paper. In contrast to existing beaconless protocols, the proposed protocol is designed such that it eliminates the need for potential relays to undergo a relay selection process. Rather, any eligible relay may decide to forward the packet ahead, thus significantly reducing the underlying overhead. The operation of the proposed protocol is empowered by exploiting favorable features of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) at the physical layer. The end-to-end performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated against existing beaconless position-based protocols analytically and as well by means of simulations. The proposed protocol is demonstrated in this paper to be more efficient. In particular, it is shown that for the same amount of energy the proposed protocol transports one bit from source to destination much quicker.