SyncWUF: An Ultra Low-Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, power consumption is one of the key design issues because a large number of sensor nodes are powered by cheap batteries. Switching the RF transceiver, which is one of the biggest power consumers in a sensor node, to low-power sleep mode as much as possible has been proven to be a very efficient way to save power with a factor of tens or even hundreds. So far, several schemes have been proposed to reduce the duty cycle of the RF transceiver by MAC layer scheduling. Among them, the wake-up-frame scheme and the WiseMAC are two very efficient protocols based on the so-called preamble sampling technology. This paper proposes combining these two schemes to obtain a further optimized low-power MAC protocol, called SyncWUF, for low-traffic wireless sensor network. Analytical and simulation results prove that our proposal achieves significant battery lifetime gain in different application cases without negatively affecting other important system parameters such as channel capacity and latency