Ensuring that an active path is provided at all times in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is fundamental for securing the timely delivery of critical data and maintaining the quality of service required to effectively support delay-sensitive applications. In duty cycling mode, ensuring such a path becomes a real challenge as the activity scheduling of different nodes should be regulated and adjusted to provide a pipe-lined node activity from source to sink. Furthermore, some transmission delays may be incurred in waiting for a next-hop node to be awakened. The data transfer time is mainly influenced by the performance of both MAC and routing protocols; an inter-layer design allowing efficient coordination between the MAC and routing is then necessary to make the appropriate decisions relating to the selection of the next hop and the adjustment of the duty cycle. In this article, we provide a cross-layer multi-path routing approach designed to support the transfer of critical data over duty-cycled WSN networks. This approach establishes multi-node disjoint paths with complementary duty-cycling schedules to ensure the availability of an active path capable of transmitting critical data at all times. It relies on a tight cooperation between the routing and MAC layers in order to appropriately adjust and regulate the wake-up schedules of involved nodes in the forwarding phase. We analytically proved the correctness of the proposed scheduling adjustment rules. We conducted extensive simulations to show the ability of the CL-NDRECT to provide a viable trade-off between energy conservation and real time responsiveness. Simulation results show that CL-NDRECT provides around 65% cumulative energy saving during route establishment and data transfer compared to the always-on multipath approach at the cost of around 10% increase in response time.

确保在无线传感器网络 (WSN) 中始终提供活动路径对于确保关键数据的及时交付和维持有效支持延迟敏感应用程序所需的服务质量至关重要。在占空比模式下，确保这样的路径成为一个真正的挑战，因为应该调节和调整不同节点的活动调度，以提供从源到汇的流水线节点活动。此外，在等待唤醒下一跳节点的过程中可能会产生一些传输延迟。数据传输时间主要受MAC和路由协议的性能影响；然后需要允许 MAC 和路由之间有效协调的层间设计来做出与下一跳的选择和占空比的调整有关的适当决策。在本文中，我们提供了一种跨层多路径路由方法，旨在支持通过占空比 WSN 网络传输关键数据。这种方法建立了多节点不相交路径，具有互补的占空比计划，以确保能够始终传输关键数据的活动路径的可用性。它依赖于路由层和 MAC 层之间的紧密合作，以便在转发阶段适当地调整和调节相关节点的唤醒时间表。我们通过分析证明了所提出的调度调整规则的正确性。我们进行了广泛的模拟，以展示 CL-NDRECT 在节能和实时响应之间提供可行权衡的能力。仿真结果表明，与始终在线的多径方法相比，CL-NDRECT 在路由建立和数据传输过程中累计节能约 65%，但响应时间增加约 10%。