Cooperative contention-based forwarding for wireless sensor networks

Cooperative forwarding has been considered as an effective strategy for improving the geographic routing performancein wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, we observe that existing works do not fully utilize the forwarding opportunities provided by available neighboring nodes. In this paper, we redesign the cooperative forwarding process and present a novel cooperative contention-based forwarding (CCBF) protocol for WSNs. CCBF extends the scope of cooperation and attains the full potential of cooperative forwarding at the expense of sending one additional control message on demand. We conduct extensive simulations to study the performance of the proposed CCBF compared with existing protocols. Simulation results demonstrate that CCBF decreases the end-to-end hop counts, hence, further improves the end-to-end energy efficiency and latency. Remarkably, it provides up to 50% improvement for the packet loss ratio when the retransmission mechanism is not adopted.