Simulation of power-aware wireless sensor network architectures
Proceedings of the ACM international workshop on Performance monitoring, measurement, and evaluation of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks
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Recent technological advances and the continuing quest for greater efficiency have led to an explosion of link and network protocols for wireless sensor networks. These protocols embody very different assumptions about network stack composition and, as such, have limited interoperability. In principle, wireless sensor networks would benefit from a unifying abstraction (or "narrow waist" in architectural terms), and this abstraction should be closer to the link level than the network level [8]. Through this abstraction, protocols may transcend hardware generations and increase interoperability. This dissertation proposes a specific unifying sensornet protocol, SP. The two goals of a unifying abstraction are generality and efficiency: SP should be capable of running over a broad range of link-layer technologies and support a wide variety of network protocols. Use of our SP abstraction should not lead to a significant loss of efficiency. Our unified abstraction differs from IP, the "narrow waist" of the Internet by permitting control information to flow between network and link protocols in addition to data packets. SP provides a translucent interface with a minimal set of sufficient primitives to build efficient protocols. It includes mechanisms for reliability, urgency, detecting congestion, and changing phase, as well as a shared neighbor table and message pool. To motivate the use of control information in our SP abstraction, we show the benefits of fine-grained control in three systems: the Telos sensor node. B-MAC link protocol, and Flexible Hardware Abstraction (FHA). Fine-grained software control of hardware components leads to decreased power consumption and increased robustness properties of the Telos node. At the data link layer, B-MAC provides control and feedback information to network protocols. Through control interfaces, B-MAC coordinates with network protocols. This coordination yields significantly less power consumption than competing link protocols. Whereas B-MAC provides fine-grain link control. FHA enables fine-grain hardware control. FHA organizes system software into three layers. Depending on the amount of abstraction or performance needed, developers directly use functionality provided by different layers. To investigate effectiveness of primitives provided by our SP abstraction, we implement SP (in TinyOS) on top of two very different radio technologies: B-MAC on Mica2 and IEEE 802.15.4 on Telos. We also build a variety of network protocols on SP, including examples of collection routing [89], dissemination [40], and aggregation [50]. Measurements show that these protocols do not sacrifice performance through the use of our SP abstraction. We discuss how other network protocols could be realized efficiently using SP. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)