CPR: A Cross-layer and Power-aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks inherently are power limited. This characteristic has led to a number of routing schemes that use the limited resources available at sensor nodes more efficiently. These schemes typically try to find the path with minimum energy to optimize the energy consumption at a node, using current Ad hoc network routing protocols. In this paper, we proposed an efficient power-aware routing protocol, called CRP, specifically for the sensor networks. CPR (Cross-layer Power-aware routing) involves network and MAC layers to minimize the power saving (or maximize the lifetime) of the sensor networks. We used recently proposed S-MAC (Sensor MAC) to exploit the maximum efficiency. CPR also distributes the traffic load semi randomly in the network to reach some degrees of load balancing and minimizes the routing control traffic. We used CPR for environment monitoring scenario. In this scenario, sensor nodes must send the collected data to a central base station or sink node for further processing. We conducted extensive Simulations to optimize the parameters and find the requirements for the system to work correctly.

Keywords:

Cross-layer Design , Load balancing , Power-aware Routing Protocol , Sensor Networks