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