Opportunistic aggregation over duty cycled communications in wireless sensor networks

To implement duty cycles with packet based transceivers, a sender transmits a trail of identical packets (which we call framelets) of which the receiver is able to catch one in its active listening phase. This communication concept is used in the standard low power listening (LPL) protocol shipped with TinyOS 2.x. This existing solution has many shortcomings which result in a very limited network performance. In this paper, we firstly present an alternative framelet based low power listening implementation called Framelet Communications (FrameComm) that eliminates these shortcomings. Secondly, we present a novel additional improvement to FrameComm - Interception and Aggregation of Framelet Communications (i-FrameComm) - that further improves network performance by opportunistically aggregating packets over the radio channel. A prototype implementation of the proposed FrameComm mechanism in TinyOS 2.02 on TelosB nodes is used for evaluation and comparison. The experiments show that the interception and aggregation method increases network throughput and lifetime as communication resources are used more efficiently.