Latency and energy optimization using MAC-aware routing for WSNs

Protocols for wireless sensor networks are generally designed following the layered protocol stack where layers are independent. Uncorrelated decisions coming from different layers may affect certain metrics such as the latency of communications, the energy consumption, etc. Cross-layer approaches overcome this problem by exploiting the dependencies between the layers. In this article, the authors propose latency and energy mac-aware routing for wireless sensor networks (LEMAR-WSN), a new cross-layer routing approach using information of the TDMA schedule and exploiting the information of the energy consumed by each node in order to optimize the latency of communications and the energy consumption when relaying information to the sink in a wireless sensor network. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves the average latency of communications up to 20% and the average.