A cross-layer approach for data replication and gathering in decentralized long-living wireless sensor networks

Realizing highly reliable wireless sensor networks with a long lifetime is a challenging task. A long lifetime is normally achieved by low duty cycles and rare activity. High reliability requires the replication of data to cope with dying nodes, network fragmentation, etc. These problems become even harder to tackle in networks with no wired sink (decentralized networks), which can synchronize the nodes and store data. We thoroughly investigated the challenges and present a reasonable approach, which adopts cross-layer rendezvous and data dissemination schemes. Our protocol can achieve very good results for lifetime, efficient replication handling and data gathering in decentralized sensor networks. Off-the-shelf sensor nodes based on our approach offer a lifetime of two years. However, our simulation results reveal that very long sleep phases may lead to increased power consumption, which is not expected.