Early Overhearing Avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

To reduce the overhearing cost of long preambles in low power listening (LPL), we propose an early overhearing avoidance technique, in which the destination address is embedded into the continuous preamble. The overhearing can be stopped after receiving a short preamble block, which is much earlier than after the whole data packet is received. Based on this idea, a novel low power media access control (MAC) protocol called asynchronous pseudo preamble listening (APPL) is designed to improve the power efficiency of LPL. Both analysis and experiments show that APPL saves more power than LPL, especially on nodes with more neighbors and fewer children.