Efficient opportunistic routing protocol for sensor network in emergency applications

Routing or forwarding information, such as the location of incidents and victims in a disaster, is significantly important for quick and accurate incident response. However, forwarding such information in disaster areas has been a challenging task for the Wireless Sensor Network as existing networks are affected (destroyed or overused) the disaster. Opportunistic information forwarding can play a vital role in such circumstances. Existing opportunistic routing protocols require huge message transmissions for cluster restoration, which is not energy efficient and results in packet loss. Hence, this paper introduces an energy efficient and reliable opportunistic density cluster-based routing protocol that opportunistically transmits data using a density-clustering protocol for emergency and disaster situations. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms some existing and well-known routing protocols in terms of network energy consumption, throughput and successful data transmissions.