M.: Low power, low delay: Opportunistic routing meets duty cycling

Traditionally, routing in wireless sensor networks consists of two steps: First, the routing protocol selects a next hop, and, second, the MAC protocol waits for the intended desti-nation to wake up and receive the data. This design makes it difficult to adapt to link dynamics and introduces delays while waiting for the next hop to wake up. In this paper we introduce ORW, a practical opportunis-tic routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. In a duty-cycled setting, packets are addressed to sets of potential re-ceivers and forwarded by the neighbor that wakes up first and successfully receives the packet. This reduces delay and energy consumption by utilizing all neighbors as potential forwarders. Furthermore, this increases resilience to wire-less link dynamics by exploiting spatial diversity. Our re-sults show that ORW reduces radio duty-cycles on average by 50 % (up to 90 % on individual nodes) and delays by 30% to 90 % when compared to the state of the art