Hardware-aware communication protocols in low energy wireless sensor networks

As the energy consumption in sensor nodes is dominated by the radio transmission/reception circuitry, communication protocols must be designed for economy in radio communications. Sensor nodes are generally equipped with short-range radios that have various characteristics including data rate, power consumption in transmit, receive, and sleep modes, and time to switch from one mode to another. These parameters can have significant effects on the performance of communication protocols in low energy sensor networks. In this paper, we consider a protocol called STEM that was proposed in [C. Schurgers et. al., January-March 2002] and optimize the protocol's parameters by considering the radio characteristics.