Abstract
Radio transceivers are the main source of energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the source of energy supply is non-rechargeable battery. Several MAC protocols have been proposed in order to efficiently conserve energy in the link layer via duty-cycling. Low power listening (LPL) methods have been shown to outperform other schemes in lightly loaded situations which are common in environment monitoring applications. Nonetheless, as the network becomes dense, in LPL protocols such as BMAC a large number of nodes stay awake for each transmission, resulting in high levels of energy consumption. This paper introduces the informative preamble sampling (IPS) protocol in which a transmitter implicitly embeds information about its intended receiver via the power at which the preamble is transmitted. This results in far fewer nodes staying awake for each preamble. Upon hearing the preamble, a receiver executes a decision-making algorithm to decide whether to stay awake. If the decision-making algorithm is too lax, then more nodes stay awake following the preamble. On the other hand if the algorithm is too strict, it is likely that the intended receiver misses the preamble. In this paper we derive the optimal operating points for the IPS protocol. We show analytically that the IPS protocol can achieve a gain in energy by at least a factor of 2 over BMAC. We also conduct extensive simulations to show that IPS can achieve significant energy gains compared to BMAC.
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Notes
Recent chips support upto 255 different power level which gives us enough precision.
The average probability of hearing a preamble for a node in the range of R ε from a sender is \(\frac{M_{T}}{\pi\rho R_{\epsilon}^{2}}\) per successful transmission. Therefore, it is expected for a node to hear from \(\pi\rho R_{\epsilon}^{2}\) possible senders in its range by the generation rate of r d . Hence, the expected number of hearing for a node is \((\pi\rho R_{\epsilon}^{2})r_{d}\times \frac{M_{T}} {\pi\rho R_{\epsilon}^{2}}=r_{d}M_{T}\).
It should be noted that a typical transceiver e.g. CC1000 has high precision of −110 dbm in measuring the received power which is good enough for our application.
This is the demodulator used in MICA2.
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Ahdi, F., Wang, W., Srinivasan, V. et al. IPS-MAC: an informative preamble sampling MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. Wireless Netw 16, 1373–1387 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-009-0209-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-009-0209-7