NoSE: Neighbor Search and Link Estimation for a Fast and Energy Efficient Initialization of WSNs

Abstract

With numerous application-specific low-power protocols being developed over the past years the design space has been widely covered. However, not much attention has been paid to the start up and initialization phase of a low-power protocol stack, e.g. when the actual start of the application is delayed by a long installation and deployment phase. In this paper we present NoSE, an extension to existing protocols that optimizes operation in the startup phase. NoSE uses a reduced signaling scheme to achieve an extremely efficient, yet highly reactive wakeup scheme for a delayed initialization of the main communication. Upon initialization, using a wakeup beacon, the protocol scheme wakes all neighbors and performs a neighborhood search with an integrated link assessment. Following the description of the protocol we present an evaluation using analytical methods and a testbed implementation concluding in a discussion including a comparison with other well known protocols.