COMPLEMENTING THE GSP ROUTING PROTOCOL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Gossip-Based Sleep Protocol (GSP) is a routing protocol in the flooding family with overhead generated by duplicate packets. GSP does not have other sources of overhead or additional information requirements common in routing protocols, such as routing packets, geographical information, addressing or explicit route computation. Because of its simple functionality, GSP is a candidate routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. However, previous research showed that GSP uses the majority of energy in the network by keeping the nodes with their radios on ready to receive, even when there are no transmissions, situation known as Idle Listening. Complementing GSP implies creating additional protocols that make use of GSP particular characteristics in order to improve performance without additional overhead. The research analyzes the performance of GSP with different topologies, number of hops from source to destination and node densities, and presents one alternative protocol to complement GSP decreasing idle listening, number of duplicate packets in the network and overall energy consumption. The study compared the results of this alternative protocol, MACGSP6, to a protocol stack proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks: Sensor MAC (S-MAC) with Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), showing the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches

THE EFFECT OF INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PROTOCOLS AND PHYSICAL TOPOLOGIES ON THE LIFETIME OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks enable monitoring and control applications such weather sensing, target tracking, medical monitoring, road monitoring, and airport lighting. Additionally, these applications require long term and robust sensing, and therefore require sensor networks to have long system lifetime. However, sensor devices are typically battery operated. The design of long lifetime networks requires efficient sensor node circuits, architectures, algorithms, and protocols. In this research, we observed that most protocols turn on sensor radios to listen or receive data then make a decision whether or not to relay it. To conserve energy, sensor nodes should consider not listening or receiving the data when not necessary by turning off the radio. We employ a cross layer scheme to target at the network layer issues. We propose a simple, scalable, and energy efficient forwarding scheme, which is called Gossip-based Sleep Protocol (GSP). Our proposed GSP protocol is designed for large low-cost wireless sensor networks with low complexity to reduce the energy cost for every node as much as possible. The analysis shows that allowing some nodes to remain in sleep mode improves energy efficiency and extends network lifetime without data loss in the topologies such as square grid, rectangular grid, random grid, lattice topology, and star topology. Additionally, GSP distributes energy consumption over the entire network because the nodes go to sleep in a fully random fashion and the traffic forwarding continuously via the same path can be avoided