A new Ultra-Low Energy Consumption Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In any Wireless Sensor Network, the principal operation is the data acquisition by remote wireless sensor nodes, and data reporting through multi-hop communication to a central hub. In this paper, we designed a communication protocol, Ultra-Low Energy Consumption Communication Protocol (ULECCP), especially for data acquisition applications exhibiting very stringent power constraints and relatively large observation intervals. Our new communication protocol has two significant contributions compared to existing protocols: 1) to provide full functionality at a 1/1000 duty cycle in order to maintain ultra-low energy consumption. 2) to provide routing functionality for the data reporting with virtually no additional energy consumption. For evaluation of its performance, we implemented ULECCP on a Texas Instruments eZ430-RF2500 platform. The experimental result showed a packet success rate of 97% in an 8-hop chain topology, and over 99% packet success rate in a 1-hop star topology.