FLORA: Fuzzy Based Load-Balanced Opportunistic Routing for Asynchronous Duty-Cycled WSNs

Many opportunistic routing (OR) schemes treat network nodes equally, neglecting the fact that the nodes close to the sink undertake more duties than the rest of the network nodes. Therefore, the nodes located at different positions should play different roles during the routing process. Moreover, considering various Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, the routing decision in OR is affected by multiple network attributes. The majority of these OR schemes fail to contemplate multiple network attributes while making routing decisions. To address the aforesaid issues, this paper presents a novel protocol that runs in three steps. First, each node defines a Routing Zone (RZ) to route packets toward the sink. Second, the nodes within RZ are prioritized based on the competency value obtained through a novel model that employs Modified Analytic Hierarchy Process (MAHP) and Fuzzy Logic techniques. Finally, one of the forwarders is selected as the final relay node after forwarders coordination. Through extensive experimental simulations, it is confirmed that FLORA achieves better performance compared to its counterparts in terms of energy consumption, overhead packets, waiting times, packet delivery ratio, and network lifetime.