The case for a flexible-header protocol in power constrained networks

This paper evaluates FLIP, a flexible header protocol for power-constrained, heterogeneous networks. We show that FLIP can improve the energy efficiency of a system considerably, prolonging the system´s lifetime. For example, when employing FLIP to implement an existing sensor network communication paradigm, we obtain 50% energy savings when compared to the paradigms original implementation. Further, we use a sample data gathering application that calculates the average of a sensor network´s attribute (e.g., average temperature) and show FLIP´s energy efficiency when compared to static header approaches.