Architecture strategies for energy-efficient packet forwarding in wireless sensor networks

The energy-efficient communication among wireless sensor nodes determines the lifetime of a sensor network and exhibits patterns highly dependable on the sensor application and networking software. This software is responsible for processing the sensor data and disseminating the data to other nodes or a central repository. In this paper we propose a node architecture that takes advantage of both the intelligence of the radio hardware and the needs of applications to efficiently handle the packet forwarding. It exploits principles widely used in modem firewall network architectures and as our analysis shows achieves considerable energy savings