Design a cross-layer integrated MAC and routing protocol for surveillance systems using WSNs

In this paper, we propose a new cross layer technique to design a joint MAC and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. A wireless sensor network is characterized by the limited energy resource, many-to-one communication pattern, self-organization and etc. which make its protocol design different from other wireless network. In the other hand, due to wide area of wireless sensor network applications, design an application specific protocol poses many challenges on MAC and routing layer. CI-MAC is a cross-layer protocol which is designed for surveillance application. It uses cross layer information to solve energy wastage due to idle listening and overhearing. Besides it decreases data delivery delay to the sink which is most common factor in surveillance application. This paper evaluates CI-MAC through analysis and simulations, and compares it with Adaptive S-MAC protocol which is a well-known generic MAC for wireless sensor networks. As the paper shows, CI-MAC outperforms A-S-MAC in terms of total energy consumption, while satisfying end-to-end delay.