Modular Energy Efficient Protocols for Lower Layers of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) emerged as one of the compelling research areas in recent years. It has produced promising solutions for several potential applications such as intrusion detection, target detection, industrial automation, environmental monitoring, surveillance and military systems, medical diagnosing systems, tactical systems, etc. WSNs consist of small size of sensor nodes that are disseminated in a targeted area to monitor the events for collecting the data of interest. Meanwhile, WSNs face many challenging problems such as high energy consumption, network scalability and mobility. These problems profoundly affect the lifetime of the network, limit the access to several WSN application areas, and the Quality of Service (QoS) provision parameters including throughput, latency, bandwidth, data buffering, resource constraints, data redundancy, and medium reliability. Although, there has been significant research conducted in WSNs over the last few years to maintain a high standard of communication, especially coverage, challenges of high power consumption, mobility and scalability to name a few. The major problem with WSNs at the low layers are the excessive energy consumption by the sensor’s transceiver. Other related challenges are mobility and scalability that limit the QoS provision. To handle these issues, novel modular energy efficient protocols are proposed for lower layers of WSNs. These modular based protocols improve the energy consumption, providing cross-layering support to handle mobility, scalability and data redundancy. In addition, there is a protocol that automates handling the idle listening process. Other protocols optimize data frame format for faster channel access, data frame transfer, managing acknowledgement time and retry transmission, check the capability of sensing the nature of environment to decide to use either active or passive mode that help save energy, determine shortest efficient path, packet generation rate, automatic active and sleep mode, smart queuing, data aggregation and dynamically selection of the cluster head node. All these features ensure the QoS provision and resolve many problems introduced by mobility and scalability for multiple application areas especially disaster recovery, hospital monitoring system, remotely handling the static and mobile objects and battlefield surveillance systems. Finally, modular energy efficient protocols are simulated, and results demonstrate the validity and compatibility of the proposed approaches for multiple WSNs application areas