After the occurrence of a maritime disaster, to save human life and search for important property equipment in the first time, it is indispensable to efficiently transmit search and rescue sea area data to the maritime search and rescue command center (MSRCC) in real-time, so that the MSRCC can make timely and accurate decisions. The key to determining the efficiency of data forwarding is the quality of the routing protocol. Due to the high dynamics of the marine environment and the limited

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... gy of the marine node, the coverage hole and routing path failure problems occur frequently when using the existing routing algorithm for marine data forwarding. Based on the above background, in this work, we study a low-latency and energy-efficient opportunistic routing protocol for maritime search and rescue wireless sensor networks (MSR-WSNs). Considering the adverse impact of wave shadowing on signal transmission, an effective link reliability prediction method is first investigated to quantify the link connectivity among nodes. To mitigate the end-to-end time delay, an optimal expected packet advancement is then derived by combining link con-nectivity with geographic progress threshold θ. After that, based on the link connectivity between marine nodes, the optimal expected packet advancement prediction, the distance from the sensing nodes to the sink, and the remaining energy distribution of the nodes, the priority of candidate nodes is calculated and sorted in descending order. Finally, timer-based coordination algorithm is adopted to perform the marine data packet forwarding so as to avoid packet conflict. Computer simulation results demonstrate that compared with benchmark algorithms, the data packet delivery ratio, the delay performance and the average node energy consumption (the average node speed is 20 m/s) of the proposed opportunistic routing protocol are improved by more than 21.4%, 39.2% and 18.1%, respectively.