Towards Energy Efficient, High-Speed Communication in WSNs

Abstract. Traditionally, protocols in wireless sensor networks focus on low-power operation with low data-rates. In addition, a small set of pro-tocols provides high throughput communication. With sensor networks developing into general propose networks, we argue that protocols need to provide both: low data-rates at high energy-efficiency and, addition-ally, a high throughput mode. This is essential, for example, to quickly collect large amounts of raw-data from a sensor. This paper presents a set of practical extensions to the low-power, low-delay routing protocol ORW. We introduce the capability to handle mul-tiple, concurrent bulk-transfers in dynamic application scenarios. Over-all, our extensions allow ORW to reach an almost 500 % increase in the throughput with less than a 25 % increase of the power consumption dur-ing a bulk transfer. Thus, we show that instead of developing a new pro-tocol from scratch, we can carefully enhance an existing, energy-efficient protocol with high-throughput extensions. Both the energy-efficient low data-rate mode and the high throughput extensions transparently co-exist inside a single protocol