Pulse Switching for Static Event Sensing in Sensor Networks

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for event sensing applications with binary sensing. Event sensing with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet´s data, header, and preambles. The paper presents a joint MAC-Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.