Poster abstract: Shipping data from heterogeneous protocols on packet train

The maturity and availability of network protocols have enabled wireless sensor networks (WSN) designers to build heterogeneous applications by composing different protocols. A common heterogeneous application combines data collection and dissemination for environmental monitoring with node retasking. While these co-located protocols on the same node have different goals, many of them share requirements and characteristics. Examples of commonalities include the use of bi-directional traffic for reliable transmissions and tree for packet routing. This work explores how the MAC layer can reduce the network transmission overhead of heterogeneous applications by taking advantage of protocol commonalities to aggregate outgoing packets. In other words, this aggregation creates a train of packets destined to the same receiver. Finally, we discuss a strawman implementation of packet train and how our data center monitoring deployment leverages it.