Abstract-Severe energy constraints of battery-powered sensor nodes necessitate energy-efficient communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, the vast majority of the existing solutions are based on the classical layered protocol approach, which leads to significant overhead. It is much more efficient to have a unified scheme, which blends common protocol layer functionalities into a cross-layer module. In this paper, a cross-layer protocol (XLP) is introduced, which achieves congestion control, routing, and medium access control in a cross-layer fashion. The design principle of XLP is based on the cross-layer concept of initiative determination, which enables receiver-based contention, initiative-based forwarding, local congestion control, and distributed duty cycle operation to realize efficient and reliable communication in WSNs. The initiative determination requires simple comparisons against thresholds, and thus, is very simple to implement, even on computationally constrained devices. To the best of our knowledge, XLP is the first protocol that integrates functionalities of all layers from PHY to transport into a cross-layer protocol. A cross-layer analytical framework is developed to investigate the performance of the XLP. Moreover, in a cross-layer simulation platform, the stateof-the-art layered and cross-layer protocols have been implemented along with XLP for performance evaluations. XLP significantly improves the communication performance and outperforms the traditional layered protocol architectures in terms of both network performance and implementation complexity.
International Journal of Networked and Distributed Computing, Vol. 5, No. 2 (April 2017) 80-92 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our proposed I-XLP also includes congestion control, routing, and MAC functionalities in a cross-layer fashion. But I-XLP is different from XLP REF in the sense that design principle of XLP is based on initiative determination, which enables receiver-based contention, initiative-based forwarding, local congestion control, and distributed duty cycle operation in WSNs.
XLP: A Cross-Layer Protocol for Efficient Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Computer Science