The politecast communication primitive for low-power wireless

ion can improve performance without significantly breaking layered abstractions; explicit bursts are preferable to steady, constant bitrate traffic. Furthermore, the vagaries and challenges of long-term wireless behavior exert a strong pressure towards very simple mechanisms which are easy to understand. This paper presents Politecast, a deceptively simple API for low-power communication. Politecast skates the difficult tension between the energy cost of transmission and the energy cost of reception by leveraging application-level information. Politecast nodes periodically advertise information; a receiver wakes up to hear advertisements when application-level knowledge leads it to believe it needs them. This mechanism might seem so simple as to be obvious, but sometimes it is these subtle twists on what are believed to be completely understood areas that have the greatest insight and contribution. For the past decade, low-power research has increasingly focused on unicast. This paper ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCR
• Authors: Marcus Lundén, Adam Dunkels
• Keywords: CCR 2011, Energy Cost, Low-power Wireless Application, Paper, Software Engineering