— The paper presents IRIS, an Integrated Routing and Interest dissemination System for wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocols are designed to work under very low duty cycle operations and are jointly optimized for improved efficiency. Routing towards the sink is achieved by exploiting hop count information which is proactively distributed during the interest dissemination phase. Node densities are locally and dynamically estimated at each node and exploited at the MAC layer by means of a cost based probabilistic scheme. A cross-layer routing/MAC scheme is defined where relays to the sink are selected based on nodes’ resources (including energy and queue occupancy). The proposed solution is a step towards the definition of complete, self-adapting and autonomous sensor network systems.