SWIMAC: An Ultra-Low Power Consumption MAC Protocol for IR-UWB-Based WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has gained popularity in recent times in residential, commercial and industrial application. In this type of network, the energy efficiency is the key design challenge. The introduction of the IR-UWB technology in the field of WSN was promising for researchers especially for its low power consumption feature. For this reason, MAC layer protocols for IR-UWB-based WSN must be energy efficient to exploit the main features of IR-UWB technology implemented in the physical layer. In this paper, we present and show the good impact in terms of energy consumption for an energy-efficient MAC protocol in WSN based on IR-UWB. This MAC protocol takes advantage of these two key properties by using synchronous periodic beacon transmissions from each network node and its duty-cycling mode. We developed our own class SwiMacLayer under MiXiM platform on OMNet++ to test and evaluate the performance of SWIMAC protocol compared to ALOHA.