A MAC protocol with adaptive preloads considering low duty-cycle in WSNs

Abstract

Leading MAC protocols developed for duty-cycled WSNs such as B-MAC employ a long preamble and channel sampling. The long preamble introduces excess latency at each hop and results in excess energy consumption at non-target receivers in ultra low-duty cycled WSNs. In this paper we propose AS-MAC (Asynchronous Sensor MAC), a low power MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). AS-MAC solves these problems by employing a series of preload approach that retains the advantages of low power listening and independent channel sampling schedule. The preload massage includes a destination address and a remaining time until data transmission. Moreover AS-MAC offers an additional advantage such as flexible duty cycle as data rate varies. We demonstrate that AS-MAC is better performance than B-MAC through analysis and evaluation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.