An energy-efficient diagonal-based directed diffusion for wireless sensor networks

We present a new energy-efficient directed diffusion protocol by using the proposed diagonal-based hexagonal-mesh scheme for a wireless sensor network. The wireless sensor network is more reasonable to build a fixed-topological wireless network environment than the conventional MANET due to the low mobility. Therefore, all sensor nodes are arranged into a fixed-topological wireless network structure, namely the hexagonal-mesh, while the MAC protocol is adopted using the periodic active-and-sleep model. The wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. The directed diffusion is mainly operated on the diagonal-paths of the hexagonal-mesh under the energy-efficient consideration. To achieve the energy-efficient purpose, our diagonal-based directed diffusion scheme has the following main contributions: (1) a periodic active-and-sleep MAC protocol on TDMA channel model is designed; (2) a periodic backbone-path-exchange scheme is periodically performed on the diagonal-mesh to consider the per-node fairness problem; and (3) a directed diffusion communication application is developed based on the diagonal-based scheme. Finally, the performance analysis result is demonstrated to illustrate the energy-efficient achievement of our proposed scheme.