Self-organized pulse switching for binary sensing and actuation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient distributed self-organized pulse switching architecture with a cell based event localization for wireless sensor and actuator network applications. The key idea of this pulse switching architecture is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Unlike multi-bit packet communication, the proposed pulse switching architecture is based on pulse communications where a node either transmits a pulse or keeps silent at every time unit. Specifically, an event can be coded as a single pulse in a specific time unit with respect to the global clock. Then the pulse is transported multi-hop while preserving the event’s localization information in the form of temporal pulse position representing its originating cell, destination cell and next-hop cell. The proposed distributed pulse switching is shown to be energy-efficient compared to traditional packet switching especially for binary event sensing and actuation applications. Binary event sensing and actuation 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. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for self-organized distributed pulse switching. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective distributed means for event based networking in wireless sensor and actuator networks, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.