Joint routing, MAC and physical layer protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the last few years, saving of energy in the wireless sensor network (WSNs) world has been, and continue to be now an important challenge in the area of WSNs. In this paper, energy aspect has been investigated, with specific regard to routing, MAC and physical layer. We propose a novel joint routing, medium access control (MAC) and physical layer protocol for wireless sensor network (WSNs) based on basic novelty feature of IH-MAC [4]. This is referred to as a Joint Routing, MAC and Physical layer protocol (RMP). The concept ran by blending the classical layered approach and combining routing, MAC and physical layer functions, the proposed RMP protocol achieves a solution for energy efficiency in WSNs. Conventionally, the problem of energy efficient protocol design is considered independently at respective layer of protocol stack. This paper has taken a holistic approach of finding solution by addressing the possible energy gain in Routing, MAC and Physical layer together. Firstly, it is seen that communication path with the large number of short hop substantially minimizes energy consumption. This phenomenon is used while instantaneous network information is collected with minimum overhead through the control packets for selecting next hop. Based on the updated network knowledge the next hop neighbour is chosen with reduced control overhead. Besides, the RMP protocol uses the approach for finding the constrained shortest path for forwarding packets [1], which results in load balancing in WSNs. We compare the RMP with other two existing protocols by network simulator ns-2. The simulation outcome of RMP supports the theatrical idea, and confirm the efficiency of proposed RMP because the energy consumption is reduced through applying the theory within simulation application.