s-net® Energy optimized communication for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network is a system of distributed sensor nodes that interact with each other and - depending on the application - even interact with the environment in order to acquire, process, transfer, and provide information extracted from the physical world and to respond to those stimuli by influencing the physical world. Application requirements call for certain quality of service aspects or a certain system lifetime that needs to be met. The biggest contributor to quality of service aspects and power consumption aspects in a wireless sensor network is the communication protocol. s-net® is a wireless networking protocol developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Germany that is focusing on energy-efficient and secure data communication in wireless sensor networks (http://www.s-net-info.de). Key element is the patented medium access control protocol SlottedMAC. It combines the advantages of time division multiple access systems (TDMA) ? namely efficient use of the medium and efficient use of energy - with the scalability and flexibility advantages of contention-based protocols. The nodes synchronize themselves in a virtual tree structure rooted at the master node. This dynamic formation and self-organization of the network topology ensures low configuration effort, low maintenance and a high level of robustness. s-net® allows a multi-hop communication for data transmission via intermediary nodes with a scalable range of the multi-hop data communication for fast data transport through the network. Time division multiplexing and time synchronization of nodes leads to ultra-low-power communication because of short send and receive activity cycles. The network layer TriNwk allows address based forwarding of packets within and outside the network. Contrary to other protocols s-net® addresses the need for node mobility and enables nodes to roam freely inside an s-net® network.