Design and implementation of a routing protocol for seamless integration of unidirectional energy-autarkic wireless sensor nodes

Routing is a key feature for wireless sensor networks, as it extends the geographic range, enables larger installation and provides redundancy to packet transmission. A extensive variety of routing protocols has been designed for wireless sensor networks; however, until today, integration of unidirectional nodes poses a challenge. This paper proposes a routing algorithm to integrate unidirectional and even energy-autarkic nodes into an ad-hoc routing mechanism. It gives an insight into protocol development and various extensions, which proof the practical usability of the chosen approach as well for static and as for dynamic sensor nodes. The protocol was implemented and tested on EnOcean wireless nodes. It enables reasonable performance while causing very small overhead with regard to memory footprint and processing power.