On the design of an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for distributed mobile sensor networks

Self organizing, wireless sensors networks are an emergent and challenging technology that is attracting large attention in the sensing and monitoring community. Impressive progress has been done in recent years even if we need to assume that an optimal protocol for every kind of sensor network applications can not exist. As a result it is necessary to optimize the protocol for certain scenarios. In many applications for instance latency is a crucial factor in addition to energy consumption. MERLIN performs its best in such WSNs where there is the need to reduce the latency while ensuring that energy consumption is kept to a minimum. By means of that, the low latency characteristic of MERLIN can be used as a trade off to extend node lifetimes. The performance in terms of energy consumption and latency is optimized by acting on the slot length. MERLIN is designed specifically to integrate routing, MAC and localization protocols together. Furthermore it can support data queries which is a typical application for WSNs. The MERLIN protocol eliminates the necessity to have any explicit handshake mechanism among nodes. Furthermore, the reliability is improved using multiple path message propagation in combination with an overhearing mechanism. The protocol divides the network into subsets where nodes are grouped in time zones. As a result MERLIN also shows a good scalability by utilizing an appropriate scheduling mechanism in combination with a contention period.