Implementation Study of a Centralized Routing Protocol for Data Acquisition in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) attract considerable amount of research efforts from both industry and academia. With limited power and computational capability available on a sensor node, robustness and efficiency are the main concerns when designing a routing protocol for WSNs with low complexity. There are various existing design approaches, such as data-centric approach, hierarchical approach and location-based approach, which were designed for a particular application with specific requirements. In this paper, we study the design and implementation of a routing protocol for data acquisition in WSNs. The designed routing protocol is named Centralized Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation (CSPIN), which essentially combines the advertise-request-transfer process and a routing distribution mechanism. Implementation is realized and demonstrated with the Crossbow MicaZ hardware using nesC/TinyOS. It was our intention to provide a hand-on study of implementation of centralized routing protocol for WSNs.