WIRELESS PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS, cilt.65, sa.3, ss.689-712, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
With the increasing number and variety of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications the need to define a suitable protocol design model that fits their specific requirements and operation has become even more pressing. The traditional methods and the well known OSI layered model prove to be inadequate for WSNs. Utilizing cross layer interactions on the other hand leads to increased efficiency in operation and prolonging the network lifetime. Similarly, proper optimization can even further add to improving the performance and reducing energy consumption in WSN. However there is no common ground to compare the suggested solutions or there is no well defined methodology for determining the optimization parameters for each specific case. In this paper we discuss two major issues: the first one is definition of optimization parameters for WSN and check for their consistency, the second one is how the suggested approach can be incorporated in a cross layer framework to provide adaptivity to different application requirements while maximizing the network performance and prolonging the network lifetime.