Towards Energy Efficient, High-Speed Communication in WSNs

Traditionally, protocols in wireless sensor networks focus on low-power operation with low data-rates. In addition, a small set of protocols provides high throughput communication. With sensor networks developing into general propose networks, we argue that protocols need to provide both: low data-rates at high energy-efficiency and, additionally, a high throughput mode. This is essential, for example, to quickly collect large amounts of raw-data from a sensor. This paper presents a set of practical extensions to the low-power, lowdelay routing protocol ORW. We introduce the capability to handle multiple, concurrent bulk-transfers in dynamic application scenarios. Overall, our extensions allow ORW to reach an almost 500% increase in the throughput with less than a 25% increase of the power consumption during a bulk transfer. Thus, we show that instead of developing a new protocol from scratch, we can carefully enhance an existing, energy-efficient protocol with high-throughput extensions. Both the energy-efficient low data-rate mode and the high throughput extensions transparently coexist inside a single protocol.