The Energy Cost of Control Packets in Hybrid MAC Protocols

This paper investigates the energy cost of control packets in schedule-based medium access control protocols in wireless sensor networks. Control packets can be useful not only to minimise collision, but also to avoid idle listening and overhearing. Therefore, whether or not to apply control packets is a trade-off. It will be shown that this trade-off mainly depends on the packet arrival rate at individual nodes, the transmission rate and the average number of active neighbours in the network.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HPCC
• Authors: Qian Dong, Waltenegus Dargie, Alexander Schill
• Keywords: Access Control Protocols, Control Packets, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCC 2010, Wireless Sensor Networks