A pulse switching paradigm for ultra low power cellular sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient and fault-tolerant pulse switching protocol for ultra-light-weight wireless cellular network applications. The key idea of pulse switching is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. In this paper it is shown to be sufficient for event and target tracking applications with binary sensing in terms of cellular localization. Event monitoring and target tracking with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles. Additionally, both of them can be unreliable without protection from errors and faults occurrence. The paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel cellular event localization in the presence of errors and faults. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments, it is shown that cellular pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information is binary in nature.