Asynchronous power efficient communication protocols are crucial to the success of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as a distributed computing paradigm. This paper presents an improved asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol for WSN. It adopts a novel dual preamble sampling (DPS) approach by combining low power listening (LPL) with short strobed preambles to significantly reduce idle listening in existing protocols. In our ns-2 based experiments, the performance of the proposed solution is compared with B-MAC and X-MAC, two most recent and popular asynchronous MAC protocols forWSNs. Depending on the traffic load and preamble length, the proposed DPS-MAC improves energy consumption significantly compared to X-MAC without degrading other network performances such as delivery ratio and latency. For example for the traffic rate of 0.1 packets/s and preamble length of 0.1s, the average improvement in energy consumption compared to X-MAC is about 154%.
['Heping Wang', 'Xiaobo Zhang', 'Farid Nait-Abdesselam', 'Ashfaq A. Khokhar']
DPS-MAC: an asynchronous MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks