MEOW: Model-based design of an energy-optimized protocol stack for wireless sensor networks

The MEOW model-based design of an energy-optimized protocol stack addresses energy-aware functional design, optimization, simulation and code generation for WSNs. The goal is to satisfy functional and performance requirements, while maximizing battery lifetime. MEOW has been developed using the Matlab and Stateflow tools, which can be used in a model-based design environment to provide opportunities for co-design of the application and of the parameters of the communication stack, and then to generate code automatically for a variety of simulation and implementation platforms. MEOW allows the designer, who may not be a telecommunication protocol specialist, but is an expert of the final application domain (e.g. building automation, industrial automation, etc.), to optimize energy consumption at each network layer. It also includes cross-layer optimizations, which provide even more reduction of energy consumption and improve sharing of resources. For the Physical layer, we provide a method to optimize at design time and control at runtime the transmission power depending on the channel quality. For the MAC layer, we developed the PE-MAC algorithm, which uses asynchronous scheduling for the sleep time and optimizes the backoff delay, minimum backoff exponential and transmitted power. For the network layer, we optimize at design time, using closed form equations, and at runtime, using channel quality estimations, the number of nodes and hops to transmit packets across a given distance. We also discuss dynamic network routing approaches, which optimize battery lifetime with a limited overhead.