The lifetime of a node in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is directly responsible for the longevity of the wireless network. The routing of packets is the most energy-consuming activity for a sensor node. Thus, finding an energy-efficient routing strategy for transmission of packets becomes of utmost importance. The opportunistic routing (OR) protocol is one of the new routing protocol that promises reliability and energy efficiency during transmission of packets in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this paper, we propose an intelligent opportunistic routing protocol (IOP) using a machine learning technique, to select a relay node from the list of potential forwarder nodes to achieve energy efficiency and reliability in the network. The proposed approach might have applications including e-healthcare services. As the proposed method might achieve reliability in the network because it can connect several healthcare network devices in a better way and good healthcare services might be offered. In addition to this, the proposed method saves energy, therefore, it helps the remote patient to connect with healthcare services for a longer duration with the integration of IoT services.
Keywords: energy efficiency; naïve Bayes; opportunistic routing (OR); relay node; reliability; wireless sensor networks (WSN).