treNch: Ultra-Low Power Wireless Communication Protocol for IoT and Energy Harvesting Moreno Cruz, Fernando Toral López, Víctor Rivadeneyra Torres, Almudena Morales Santos, Diego Pedro Wireless sensor networks (WSN) Internet of Things (IoT) Ultra-low power Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Energy harvesting Although the number of Internet of Things devices increases every year, efforts to decrease hardware energy demands and to improve efficiencies of the energy-harvesting stages have reached an ultra-low power level. However, no current standard of wireless communication protocol (WCP) can fully address those scenarios. Our focus in this paper is to introduce treNch, a novel WCP implementing the cross-layer principle to use the power input for adapting its operation in a dynamic manner that goes from pure best-effort to nearly real time. Together with the energy-management algorithm, it operates with asynchronous transmissions, synchronous and optional receptions, short frame sizes and a light architecture that gives control to the nodes. These features make treNch an optimal option for wireless sensor networks with ultra-low power demands and severe energy fluctuations. We demonstrate through a comparison with different modes of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) a decrease of the power consumption in 1 to 2 orders of magnitude for different scenarios at equal quality of service. Moreover, we propose some security optimizations, such as shorter over-the-air counters, to reduce the packet overhead without decreasing the security level. Finally, we discuss other features aside of the energy needs, such as latency, reliability or topology, brought again against BLE. 2020-12-21T12:03:08Z 2020-12-21T12:03:08Z 2020-10-29 journal article Moreno-Cruz, F., Toral-López, V., Escobar-Molero, A., Ruíz, V. U., Rivadeneyra, A., & Morales, D. P. (2020). treNch: Ultra-Low Power Wireless Communication Protocol for IoT and Energy Harvesting. Sensors, 20(21), 6156. [doi:10.3390/s20216156] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/65071 10.3390/s20216156 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España Mdpi