Design, Analysis and Evaluation of A New Energy Conserving MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Low power listening (LPL) MAC protocols based on duty-cycling mechanism have been studied extensively to achieve ultra low energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Especially, recent ACK-based LPL schemes such as X-MAC employ strobe preambles and an early ACK, and show fair performances in communications and energy efficiencies. However, the state-of-the-art ACK-based LPL scheme still suffers from collision problems due to the protocol incompleteness. These collision effects are not trivial and make WSNs unstable, aggravate energy consumptions. In this paper, we propose two novel schemes; (i) ?-duration CCA to mitigate the collision problem in ACK-based LPL MAC protocols. (ii) Short Preamble Counter (SPC) to conserve more energy by reducing unnecessary overhearing. We demonstrate the performance improvement of our scheme via a mathematical analysis and real-time experiments. Both analysis and experimental results confirm that our proposed scheme saves energy by up to 36% compared to the naive ACK-based LPL MAC protocol thanks to ?-duration CCA and SPC.