The bus goes wireless: Routing-free data collection with QoS guarantees in sensor networks

We present the low-power wireless bus (LWB), a new communication paradigm for QoS-aware data collection in low-power sensor networks. The LWB maps all communication onto network floods by using Glossy, an efficient flooding architecture for wireless sensor networks. Therefore, unlike current solutions, the LWB requires no information of the network topology, and inherently supports networks with mobile nodes and multiple data sinks. A LWB prototype implemented in Contiki guarantees bounded end-to-end communication delay and duplicate-free, in-order packet delivery - key QoS requirements in many control and mission-critical applications. Experiments on two testbeds demonstrate that the LWB prototype outperforms state-of-the-art data collection and link layer protocols, in terms of reliability and energy efficiency. For instance, we measure an average radio duty cycle of 1.69 % and an overall data yield of 99.97% in a typical data collection scenario with 85 sensor nodes on Twist.