End-to-End Routing for Dual-Radio Sensor Networks

Dual-radio, dual-processor nodes are an emerging class of wireless sensor network devices that provide both low-energy operation as well as substantially increased computational performance and communication bandwidth for applications. In such systems, the secondary radio and processor operates with sufficiently low power that it may remain always vigilant, while the main processor and primary, high-bandwidth radio remain off until triggered by the application. By exploiting the high energy efficiency of the main processor and primary radio along with proper usage, net operating energy benefits are enabled for applications. The secondary radio provides a constantly available multi-hop network, while paths in the primary network exist only when required. This paper describes a topology control mechanism for establishing an end-to-end path in a network of dual-radio nodes using the secondary radios as a control channel to selectively wake up nodes along the required end-to-end path. Using numerical models as well as testbed experimentation, we show that our proposed mechanism provides significant energy savings of more than 60% compared to alternative approaches, and that it incurs only moderately greater application latency.