Reliable and energy-efficient downward packet delivery in asymmetric transmission power-based networks

In low-power wireless networks, maintaining multihop connectivity is considered effective in constructing communication routes between individual nodes to a gateway. Since sensor networks are typically used for data collection, multihop routing protocols are designed to find routes optimal in upward directions. As sensor networks become widely applied to diverse applications, efficient downward traffic delivery also becomes important. To achieve this, we consider an asymmetric transmission power-based network (APN), where a power-supplied gateway uses high-power radios to cover the entire network via single-hop transmission, whereas common nodes use low-power transmissions. For effective APN operations, we propose a single-hop downlink protocol (SHDP) that consists of direct downlink transmission, local acknowledgment, neighbor forwarding, and contention resolution among the destination's neighbors. We evaluate SHDP through mathematical analysis, simulations, and testbed experiments. Our proposal outperforms other competitive multihop routing protocols. Specifically, SHDP shows high packet delivery performance and lowers the duty cycle greatly while reducing the packet transmission overhead by >50%.