The pulse protocol: energy efficient infrastructure access

We present the pulse protocol which is designed for multi-hop wireless infrastructure access. While similar to the more traditional access point model, it is extended to operate across multiple hops. This is particularly useful for conference, airport, or large corporate deployments. In these types of environments where users are highly mobile, energy efficiency becomes of great importance. The pulse protocol utilizes a periodic flood initiated at the network gateways which provides both routing and synchronization to the network. This synchronization is used to allow idle nodes to power off their radios for a large percentage of the time when they are not needed for packet forwarding. This results in substantial energy savings. Through simulation we validate the performance of the routing protocol with respect to both packet delivery and energy savings.