Impact of lower layers for the development of routing protocols for large-scale wireless sensor networks

This paper presents an analysis of relevant aspects of the physical and media access control protocol layers for large scale wireless sensor networks compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Based on this analysis we propose methodologies to be adopted for the development of routing protocols in these scenarios. It is verified through simulations that the proposed methods improve the performance of well known packet forwarding techniques, such as geographic and hierarchical routing protocols.