The low quality of wireless links leads to perpetual packet losses. While an acknowledgment mechanism is generally used to
cope with these losses, multiple retransmissions nevertheless occur. Opportunistic routing limits these retransmissions by
taking advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless channel: sending packets to multiple receivers at once, and only
then, based on the outcome, choosing the actual next hop [1]. In this paper, we first study the potentials of opportunistic
routing in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. In particular, the reduction of retransmissions due to the broadcast
advantage is balanced with the arising need for coordination to avoid duplicate packets. We then propose Coordinated Anypath
Routing, an opportunistic routing protocol designed for wireless sensor networks, in which the coordination between receivers
is handled by an overhearing-based acknowledgment scheme. Our protocol may be used to minimize either retransmissions or power
consumption, and our simulation results show that, with lossy links, energy savings go up to 7%, even for small networks of
20 nodes.