RowBee: A Routing Protocol based on Cross-Technology Communication for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Demin Gao, Shuo Zhang, Fuquan Zhang, Tian He, Jinchi Zhang
2019 IEEE Access  
Low and dynamic duty cycles cause that the E2E delay for packet delivery is more critical in energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs). The traditional routing protocols are constrained by the in-technology communication paradigm, where Wi-Fi devices can talk to the Wi-Fi devices only, and so on for ZigBee or wireless technology. This is, however, not necessary by recent advances in cross-technology communication (CTC). The CTC enables ZigBee nodes to be coordinated by a Wi-Fi node
more » ... thout any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds the light on more efficient routing protocols design. In this paper, we introduce a new routing protocol based on a CTC technique called RowBee. RowBee takes the advantages of coordination from the Wi-Fi node to assist the ZigBee nodes for establishing routing paths and allows nodes to choose their duty cycles freely with finer duty-cycle granularity. A simple yet effective method is employed so that the ZigBee nodes are coordinately waked up simultaneously according to the beacons broadcasted by the Wi-Fi nodes. We implement RowBee based on a USRP-N210 and MICAz hybrid platform, and the experimental results show that RowBee can reduce the E2E delay greatly. INDEX TERMS Wireless sensor networks, routing protocol, cross-technology communication, energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks.
doi:10.1109/access.2019.2902902 fatcat:fz5f2nh7pzfjjd2akwd6tyhkvy