Forwarding data packets in a wireless sensor network is a challenging task due to the energy hole problem that affects the network's operation. Taking into account path vulnerability, i.e., a metric based on the transmission distance and the energy left at the nodes' batteries, an adjustable policy is proposed here that allows nodes to choose different parent nodes for forwarding their data packets towards the sink node. Path vulnerabilities are propagated in the network with reduced overall

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... rhead (e.g., no need to construct continuously routing trees). As it is demonstrated using simulation results, the proposed forwarding policy increases the time period until the first node runs out of energy when compared to other five similar policies. Throughput is also increased and the proposed policy's performance is close to the other policies with respect to network lifetime, overhead and latency.