Schedule Adaptation of Low-Power-Listening Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

—Many recent advances in MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks have been proposed to reduce idle listening, an energy wasteful state of the radio. Low-Power-Listening (LPL) protocols transmit packets for ti s (the “inter-listening interval”), thereby allowing nodes to sleep for long periods of time between channel probes. The inter-listening interval as well as the particular type of LPL protocol should be well matched to the network conditions. In this paper, we propose network-aware adaptation of the specific succession of repeated packets over the ti interval (the “MAC schedule”), which yields significant energy savings. Moreover, some LPL protocols interrupt communication between the sender and the receiver after the data packet has been successfully received. We propose a new and simple adaptation of the “transmit / receive schedule” to synchronize nodes on a slowly changing path so that energy consumption and delay are further reduced, at no cost of overhead ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Christophe J. Merlin, Wendi B. Heinzelman
• Keywords: Inter-listening Interval, Lpl Protocols, Network-aware Adaptation, TMC 2010