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Experiments with wireless sensor networks have shown that unidirectional communication links are quite common. What is even more, they have also shown that the range of a unidirectional link can exceed that of a bidirectional one by far. Still, most of todays routing protocols do not use them, they only eliminate their implications. Those protocols that do use unidirectional links introduce a lot of protocol overhead. One possible conclusion that is often drawn from this fact is that it does not pay to use unidirectional links in a routing protocol. An alternative one is that the overhead produced by the protocols needs to be reduced. This thesis follows the second line of reasoning, and introduces, describes and evaluates five new routing protocols for wireless sensor networks with unidirectional links.
This work addresses tough challenges of sensor network applications with Quality of Service requirements. That is, nodes must work with batteries for a long time, support short end-to-end delays and robust communication in multi-hop networks. It starts with presenting previous research efforts that address such challenges. For instance, many Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols keep nodes mostly sleeping to save energy and synchronize wake-up times for communication. Although such protocols offer short end-to-end delays, they still suffer from long idle listening and shortened lifetimes. The main reasons are the long time needed to detect an idle channel and inefficient ways of dealing with clock drift. This work introduces novel solutions to these problems, mainly at Layer 2 of the OSI model, that significantly reduce idle listening. First, nodes predict future drift and reduce the time needed to compensate clock uncertainty among neighbors. Second, they quickly detect an idle channel and power down the transceiver. In some scenarios, nodes work 30% longer owing to these solutions. To tackle problems with unreliable wireless links, sensor nodes may apply various solutions at Layer 2. For example, with Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol they send retries on frame losses, resulting in extra energy consumption. This work examines the impact of ARQ on the lifetime and on the reception rate. Several indoor and outdoor experiments showed that with only 1-2 retries nodes can handle many communication problems. Besides, owing to the idle-listening reduction, mentioned previously, ARQ shortens the lifetime by 10% only. Although this work addresses particular applications, the solutions presented here can be used in other scenarios and with different protocols. For instance, the energy-efficient drift compensation approach can be directly used in any schedule-based MAC protocols, like the one based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Besides, any protocol can benefit from the solution to the idle-listening reduction based on the early detection of idle channel. Finally, owing to the analytical model that estimates the lifetime of nodes, researches and developers can early evaluate MAC protocols running on various hardware platforms.