Energy efficient protocols for sensing multiple events in Smart Dust networks

Wireless sensor networks are comprised of a vast number of ultra-small, autonomous computing and communication devices, with restricted energy, that cooperate to accomplish a large sensing task. In this work: a) we propose extended versions of two data propagation protocols for such networks: the sleep-awake probabilistic forwarding protocol (SW-PFR) and the hierarchical threshold sensitive energy efficient network protocol (H-TEEN). These non-trivial extensions improve the performance of the original protocols, by introducing sleep-awake periods in the PFR protocol to save energy, and introducing a hierarchy of clustering in the TEEN protocol to better cope with large networks; b) we implemented the two protocols and performed an extensive simulation comparison of various important measures of their performance with a focus on energy consumption; c) we investigate in detail the relative advantages and disadvantages of each protocol; and d) we discuss a possible hybrid combination of the two protocols towards optimizing certain goals.