This paper presents a novel pulse switching protocol framework for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single Ultra Wide Band (UWB) pulse as the information switching granularity. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for on-off style event monitoring applications for which a monitored parameter can be modeled using a binary variable. Monitoring such events with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles for synchronization.
The paper presents joint MAC-routing protocol architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization strategy. Through analytical modeling and simulation-based experiments it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event networking, which can potentially replace the traditional packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature. Pulse Switching Toward a Packet-Less Protocol Paradigm for Event Sensing
The objective of this paper is to develop an ultra light pulse switching protocol framework for resource-constrained sensors in on-off style event monitoring applications. The key idea is to introduce a new abstraction of pulse switching in order to replace the traditional packet switching for event monitoring. An example application is intrusion detection in which while surveying a building, it may be sufficient for a sensor to generate an event to indicate an intrusion in its vicinity. Sending an event, indicating an intrusion, to a sink would require single bit information transport. A key architectural novelty in this work is to integrate a pulses’ location of origin within the MAC-routing protocol syntaxes.
More specifically, by observing the time of arrival of a pulse with respect to the MAC-routing frame, a sink can resolve the corresponding event location with a preset resolution. The problem for Multihop pulse routing is addressed by introducing a novel wave front routing protocol. Synchronized pulse waves are created in the network so that a pulse can simply “ride” synchronized phase waves across different hop-distance nodes from a sink in order to get delivered to the sink. The paper explores architectural solutions to address those three fundamental protocol challenges for pulse switching.
We proposed for minimizing impacts of node cooperation by reducing the chances of overlapping pulses during hop-distance discovery. The pulse is transmitted by B and C on the same slot in the event sub frame, the receiver A simply detects RF signals for a merged pulse in that slot. As long as the RF hardware can detect the presence of this overlapped pulse, the routing continues. In fact, this pulse merging and route diversity provides inherent in-network aggregation for events from the same event area. Note that the pulse stacking is just a representation of the fact that multiple pulses are transmitted by different nodes during the same slot. However, the protocols can enable targeted event monitoring applications such as intrusion detection and certain Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for aircraft wings, bridges, and other small structures.