Networking protocols for long life wireless sensor networks

My original contribution to knowledge is the creation of a WSN system that further improves the functionality of existing technology, whilst achieving improved power consumption and reliability. This thesis concerns the development of industrially applicable wireless sensor networks that are low-power, reliable and latency aware. This work aims to improve upon the state of the art in networking protocols for low-rate multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Presented is an application-driven co-design approach to the development of such a system. Starting with the physical layer, hardware was designed to meet industry specified requirements. The end system required further investigation of communications protocols that could achieve the derived application-level system performance specifications. A CSMA/TDMA hybrid MAC protocol was developed, leveraging numerous techniques from the literature and novel optimisations. It extends the current art with respect to power consumption for radio duty-cycled applications, and reliability, in dense wireless sensor networks, whilst respecting latency bounds. Specifically, it provides 100% packet delivery for 11 concurrent senders transmitting towards a single radio duty cycled sink-node. This is representative of an order of magnitude improvement over the comparable art, considering MAC-only mechanisms. A novel latency-aware routing protocol was developed to exploit the developed hardware and MAC protocol. It is based on a new weighted objective function with multiple fail safe mechanisms to ensure extremely high reliability and robustness. The system was empirically evaluated on two hardware platforms. These are the application-specific custom 868 MHz node and the de facto community-standard TelosB. Extensive empirical comparative performance analyses were conducted against the relevant art to demonstrate the advances made. The resultant system is capable of exceeding 10-year battery life, and exhibits reliability performance in excess of 99.9%.