A reliable cross layer routing scheme (CL-RS) for wireless sensor networks to prolong network lifetime

Design of conventional protocols for wireless sensor networks(WSN) are mainly based on energy management. The solutions for layered protocol of the WSN network are inefficient as sensors network mainly delivers real-time content thus, cross layer communication between layers of the protocol stack is highly required. In this paper, a reliable cross layer routing scheme (CL - RS) is proposed to balance energy to achieve prolonged lifetime through controlled utilization of limited energy. CL - RS considers 2 adjacent layers namely, MAC layer and network layer. Optimization issues are identified in these two layers and solutions are provided to reduce energy consumption thereby increasing network lifetime. To achieve higher energy efficiency MAC layer protocols compromise on packet latency. It is essential to attempt reduce the end-to-end delay and energy consumption using low duty cycle cross layer MAC (CL-MAC). The joint optimization design is formulated as a linear programming problem. The network is partitioned into four request zones to enable increase in network performance by using an appropriate duty cycle and routing scheme. We demonstrate by simulations that the strategy designed by combining (CL - RS) and (CL-MAC) algorithms at each layer significantly increases the network lifetime and a relation exists between the network lifetime maximization and the reliability constraint. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme under different scenarios using ns-2. Experimental results shows that proposed scheme outperforms the layered AODV in terms of packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, control overhead and energy consumption.