Edinburgh Napier University

  Existing Opportunistic routing (OR) schemes work well with asynchronous duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which effectively reduces the sender waiting time by broadcasting packets to a set of forwarders instead of a predetermined forwarder. However, these protocols seriously suffer from the multiple receivers problem which distinctly shortens the network lifetime. Many opportunistic routing protocols view each node as equal importance, neglecting the fact that the nodes close to the sink undertake more duties than the rest of network nodes. Therefore, the nodes located in different positions should play different roles during the routing process. Unlike existing solutions, this paper presents a novel fuzzy logic-driven routing protocol, which consists of three parts. Firstly, each node defines a Routing Zone (RZ) to address the problem resulting from the randomness of node deployment. Secondly, the nodes within RZ are prioritized based on competency value obtained through the fuzzy-logic model. Finally, one of 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.