Low Power MAC Protocols for Infrastructure Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper addresses low power MAC protocols for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. We are interested in the trade-off between power consumption and transmission delay, focusing on low traffic. We describe WiseMAC (Wireless Sensor MAC), a new protocol for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. Another original contribution is the analysis of the performance of PTIP (Periodic Terminal Initiated Polling). Here, polling is used in the reversed direction as compared to common polling protocols. WiseMAC and PTIP are compared with PSM, the power save protocol used in both the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee standards. Analytical expressions are given for the power consumption and the transmission delay for each protocol, as a function of the wake-up period. It is shown that WiseMAC provides, for the same delay, a significantly lower power consumption than PSM. Although less energy efficient than WiseMAC and PSM, it is shown that PTIP can, thanks to its implementation simplicity, become attractive for applications tolerating large transmission delays.

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