Physical layer driven protocol and algorithm design for energy-efficient wireless sensor networks

The potential for collaborative, robust networks of microsensors has attracted a great deal of research attention. For the most part, this is due to the compelling applications that will be enabled once wireless microsensor networks are in place; location-sensing, environmental sensing, medical monitoring and similar applications are all gaining interest. However, wireless microsensor networks pose numerous design challenges. For applications requiring long-term, robust sensing, such as military reconnaissance, one important challenge is to design sensor networks that have long system lifetimes. This challenge is especially difficult due to the energy-constrained nature of the devices. In order to design networks that have extremely long lifetimes, we propose a physical layer driven approach to designing protocols and algorithms. We first present a hardware model for our wireless sensor node and then introduce the design of physical layer aware protocols, algorithms, and applications that minimize energy consumption of the system. Our approach prescribes methods that can be used at all levels of the hierarchy to take advantage of the underlying hardware. We also show how to reduce energy consumption of non-ideal hardware through physical layer aware algorithms and protocols.