Design, Analysis and Implementation of Energy-efficient Broadcast MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

• Young-myoung Kang,
• Sangsoon Lim,
• Joon Yoo,
• Chong-kwon Kim,

Vol. 5, No. 6, June 27, 2011
10.3837/tiis.2011.06.002, Download Paper (Free):

• Wireless Sensor Network
• energy efficient MAC
• Broadcast
• low power listening
• idle listening

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), most energy saving asynchronous MAC protocols are custom tailored for unicast communications only. However, broadcast protocols are very commonly used in WSNs for a variety of functionalities, such as gathering network topology information, event monitoring and query processing. In this paper, we propose a novel low-power asynchronous broadcast MAC protocol called Alarm Broadcast (A-CAST). A-CAST employs the strobe preamble that specifies the residual waiting time for the following data transmission. Each receiver goes back to sleep upon hearing the strobe preamble for the residual time duration, to conserve energy and to wake up just before data transmission starts. We compute the energy consumption of A-CAST via rigorous mathematical analysis. The analytic results show that A-CAST outperforms B-CAST, a simple broadcast extension of the well-known B-MAC. We also implement A-CAST on sensor motes and evaluated its performance through real experiments. Our experimental results show that A-CAST reduces the energy consumption by up to 222% compared to the previously proposed protocols.

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