Pulse Switching: Toward a Packet-Less Protocol Paradigm for Event Sensing

This paper presents a novel pulse switching protocol framework for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single Ultra Wide Band (UWB) pulse as the information switching granularity. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for on-off style event monitoring applications for which a monitored parameter can be modeled using a binary variable. Monitoring such events with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet's data, header, and preambles for synchronization. The paper presents a joint MAC-routing protocol architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization strategy. Through analytical modeling and simulation-based experiments it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event networking, which can potentially replace the traditional packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.