Centralized route recovery based on multi-hop wakeup time estimation for wireless sensor networks with ultra low duty cycles

0140-3664/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2012.03.014 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2880 8434; fax: + E-mail addresses: [email protected] (W. Pak 1 Part of this paper was presented at IEEE PIMRC’09 Although various medium access control (MAC) and routing protocols have been designed for WSNs (wireless sensor networks) to extend the network lifetime, their performances are significantly aggravated under extremely low duty cycled environments because they are optimized for low duty cycles, i.e., 0.1–10%. In this paper, we propose a new centralized routing protocol with multi-hop wakeup time estimation to maximize the network lifetime of WSNs under ultra low duty cycles. It does not use packet flooding for route recovery and solves the high energy consumption problem caused by each node’s clock drift. It achieves a very long network lifetime regardless of the node density because the number of control messages does not increase with the node density. The sink node in the proposed protocol collects the clock drift information from each node and calculates the wakeup time of each node using the multi-hop wakeup time estimation. We investigate the performance of the proposed routing protocol through extensive simulations, and show that it extends the network lifetime over ten times compared to the other combinations of existing routing and MAC protocols, when it runs on the top of W-MAC designed for ultra low duty cycled environments. 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.