Routing and TDMA Joint Cross-Layer Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new cross-layer approach in which the network layer and the data link layer are combined in one new layer in order to correlate decisions on forwarding nodes involved in multi-hop communications in wireless sensor networks. More particularly, we propose a Routing and MAC joint protocol that takes the network as an input parameter and provides a routing tree and a collision-free (TDMA) schedule as output parameters while minimizing the latency of communications. Simulation results show better performance of the proposed approach than classic routing and MAC protocols. The latency is improved from 17% up to 20% with shorter schedule lengths up to 9%.