A cross-layer sleep and rate adaptation mechanism for slotted ALOHA wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The spread use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a variety of fields, ranging from the military to environmental protection, has drawn the attention of researchers to this type of networks. Despite their use in interesting applications, such as healthcare and surveillance, many shortcomings derived from their small size and constrained batteries limit their use, calling for solutions to enhance the WSNs. Born in wireless networks using the transport control protocol (TCP), cross-layer proposals have been proving that there is interdependency of parameters across the layers and that collaboration among the layers of the protocol stack can improve the performance of wireless networks in terms of quality of service, throughput, and transmission fairness. Thus, cross-layer design is merging into WSNs, especially to reduce sensors energy consumption. In this work, a cross-layer sleep and rate adaptation mechanism is proposed to operate on a slotted ALOHA WSN. Through the use of sensors sleep periods, energy consumption is reduced, and throughput reduction is mitigated by the use of the rate adaptation.