A Survey on Design and Development of Energy Efficient Cross Layer Approaches in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, there has been an increasing trend of research papers in the literature for using the cross layer protocols in the Wireless sensor networks (WSN) domain. Keeping in view these trends in this paper the proposals have been reviewed and an attempt has been done to classify the protocols in order to bring out open issues for researchers. The major challenges in WSN are limited storage, power, battery life, less computation, lower bandwidth and high error rates. Unlike the conventional layered approaches, now days different cross layer proposals are being used to overcome these challenges and used to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters like Energy efficiency, Network lifetime, throughput, delay. Open research issues in the development of cross-layer design for sensor networks are discussed in terms of QoS parameters and possible research directions are indicated to achieve the targeted QoS. Keywords— Wireless Sensors Networks, Routing, Medium access control, Quality of service parameters.