Cellular pulse switching: An architecture for event sensing and localization in sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra-light-weight wireless cellular network applications. The key idea of pulse switching is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Event monitoring with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energyinefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet's data, header, and preambles. Pulse switching, on the other hand, is shown to be sufficient for event monitoring applications that require binary sensing. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel cellular event localization framework. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace packet transport when the information is binary in nature. © Springer-Verlag 2013.