Lightweight protocol suite for wireless sensor networks: design and evaluation

Lots of protocols have been proposed to make sensor networks more reliable, efficient and applicable. However, a vitally important problem has been neglected, that is the feasibility to implement the protocol and compatibility with other protocols. In this paper, a layered architecture was designed to organize the sensor network protocols in a light way, with detailed description on the interactive interfaces between layers. In accordance with the architecture, a suite of lightweight protocols were designed and implemented as prototypes. Our proposed protocols are featured by their low requirements on the node resources, and high possibility to be deployed in the real world. All these protocols were implemented and evaluated in a unified simulation environment. Simulation results verified our expectation on the performance of the protocols.