Cross layer design approaches for Route optimization in wireless sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been considered as one of the most significant technologies from the past 21st century. However, the data from a sensing field is gathered using a sensor network which is build of low power, low cost and tiny sensor nodes that can communicate perfectly in a limited range. Also, these sensors nodes can monitor and gather data in any environment due to its potential communication and data processing abilities. Although, the sensor nodes are distributed randomly in the sensing field because of the infrastructure free nature of WSN. Moreover, the core functionality of these distributed sensor nodes is to transmit the gathered data to the Master Station (MS). It should be noted that, the sensor nodes when placed in a hostile environment may die or get physically damaged. In other words, the nodes in a hostile environment consume more computational resources, power and energy for transmission of data to MS; thereby, the nodes lose its complete strength. Hence, it is important to construct a simple and energy efficient WSN protocols to handle the above said difficulties and to manage certain environmental conditions and its changes. Moreover, the cross-layer design of the network protocols has been identified as one of the most challenging approach that can improve the WSN application performance. Also, using different OSI layers information, the overall network performance is better optimized. newline