Energy-Efficient Opportunistic Routing Algorithm for Post-Disaster Mine Internet of Things Networks

The Mine Internet of Things (MIoT), as a key technology for reconstructing post-disaster communication networks, enables a user to monitor and control the safety of an affected roadway. However, due to the challenging underground mine environment, the MIoT suffers from severe signal attenuation, vulnerable nodes, and limited energy, which result in a low level of network reliability for the post-disaster MIoT. To improve transmission reliability and reduce energy consumption, a directional-area-forwarding-based energy-efficient opportunistic routing (DEOR) approach for the post-disaster MIoT is proposed. DEOR defines a forwarding zone (FZ) for each node to route packets toward the sink. The candidate forwarding set (CFS) is constructed by the nodes within the FZ that satisfy the energy constraint and the neighboring node degree constraint. The nodes in the CFS are prioritized based on a routing quality evaluation, which takes the local attributes of the nodes, such as the directional angle, transmission distance, and residual energy, into consideration. DEOR adopts a recovery mechanism to address the issue of void nodes. The simulation results verify that the proposed DEOR approach outperforms the ORR, OBRN and ECSOR methods in terms of energy consumption, average hop count, packet delivery rate, and network lifetime.