A Hybrid Cross-Layer Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Backbone

Abstract

This paper presents BWise, a semi-synchronous cross-layer protocol for wireless sensor networks. BWise targets to mitigate the latency caused by sleep-delay in duty-cycled WSNs. BWise combines an asynchronous MAC protocol with a geographic routing. A synchronous part of the network is used to route packets with reduced latency and low energy consumption. A small number of nodes (<5%) compose this fast route. No overhead occurs since time synchronization is piggybacked in ACK message. BWise protocol was tested in simulation against X-MAC and WiseMAC, two classic protocols of literature. Both of them were combined with a greedy geographic routing protocol. For the tested scenarios, our protocol outperforms the other two both in latency and energy.