Cross-layer Enhancement to Multi-hop Routing in Sensor Networks： an Empirical Study

Lossy link is one of the unique characteristics in random-deployed sensor networks. We envision that robustness and reliability of routing cannot be ensured purely in network layer. Our idea is to enhance the performance of routing protocol by cross-layer interaction. We modified mint protocol, a routing protocol in TinyOS and proposed an enhanced version of mint called PA-mint. A transmission power control interface is added to network layer in PA-mint. When routing performance of the current network is not satisfied, PA-mint monotonically increases the transmission power via the interface we added. PA-mint is able to connect orphan nodes and robust to node mobility or key nodes failure. In the case that automatic request retransmission is employed, the number of retransmissions can be reduced by PA-mint. Results from experiments show that PA-mint increases the reliability and robustness of routing protocol by cross-layer interaction.