A cross-layer approach for enabling low duty cycled ZigBee mesh sensor networks

In this paper large scale multihop sensor networks are established as non-beacon enabled ZigBee mesh networks. The lifetime of the network is increased by putting nodes to sleep and to wakeup state autonomously. To enable a reliable system with sensor nodes sleeping in an asynchronous manner, we propose a cross-layer sleep scheduling solution coupled with ZigBeepsilas proposed AODV routing. It consists of two parts: a) neighbor aware communication (NAC) and b) adaptive resynchronization (AR). NAC avoids sending packets to sleeping nodes while AR allows the sensor nodes to adapt their sleeping schedule to their neighborspsila duty cycles. ns-2-simulations show that the performance of such a cross-layer optimized system in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio is comparable to the benchmark case of synchronized sleep schedules.