Cross-layer routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks(WSNs)are considered to be one of the main technologies that are heavily resource-constrained,in constant demand for energy-efficient and effective routing techniques . The so-called hierarchical or equivalently cluster-based routing approaches have shown substantial improvements of the WSNs performance as compared to traditional duty-cycled Medium Access Control(MAC)protocols due to the aggregation process.In addition,the use of the cross-layer approach,based on the cooperation of several layers has proven to be effective in routing data with drastic reduction in energy consumption within WSNs.However,the operation of routing data from the Cluster Heads(CHs)to the Sink remains one of the major sources of wasted node energy.As a remedy,MAC protocols using a wake-up radio(WuR)have been used to address this issue. Based on the idea of letting the CHs and other nodes in the network on a sleep mode for the longest possible period, this thesis proposes the so-called Clustering Multi-Hop Cross-Layer Protocol(CMH-CLP).The various simulation results of the proposed protocol on the basis of some standard network performance metrics show that the proposed protocol improves the WSN performance as compared with some well-known recent protocols.