Energy-efficient communication protocol is a primary design goal for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Many efforts have been done to save energy anywhere in the protocol stack through temporal and spatial data aggregation schemes, energy-aware routing protocols, activity scheduling and energy-efficient MAC protocols with duty cycle. However both control packets and beacons remain which induces a huge waste energy. Moreover, their design follows the classical layered approach with the principle of modularity in system development, which can lead to a poor performance in WSNs. This thesis focuses on the issues of energy in WSNs through energy-efficient routing and medium access control protocols. The constributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows: First, we are interested on the energy issues at the routing layer for multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We propose a mathematical framework to model and analyze the energy consumption of routing protocols in multihop WSNs by taking into account the protocol parameters, the traffic pattern and the network characteristics defined by the medium channel properties, the dynamic topology behavior, the network diameter and the node density. In this study, we show that Beacon-less routing protocol should be a best candidate to save energy in WSNs. We investigate the performance of some existing relay selection schemes which are used by Beacon-less routing protocols. Extensive simulations are proposed to evaluate their performance locally in terms of packet delivery ratio, duplicated packet and delay. Then, we extend the work in multihop wiriless networks and develop an optimal solution, Enhanced Nearest Forwarding within Radius, which tries to minimize the per-hop expected number of retranmissions in order to save energy. We present a new beaconless routing protocol called Pizza-Forwarding (PF) without any assumption on the radio environment: neither the radio range nor symmetric radio links nor radio properties (shadowing, etc.) are assumed or restricted. A classical greedy mode is proposed. To overcome the hole problem, packets are forwarded to an optimal node in the two hop neighbor following a reactive and optimized neighborhood discovery. In order to save energy due to idle listening and overhearing, we propose to combine PF's main concepts with an energy-efficient MAC protocol to provide a joint MAC/routing protocol suitable for a real radio environment. Performance results lead to conclude to the powerful behavior of PFMAC.
