WideMac: a low power and routing friendly MAC protocol for Ultra Wideband sensor networks

This paper introduces WideMac, a novel low power medium access control protocol designed specifically for Ultra Wide Band Impulse Radio transceivers. The UWB-IR channel offers ultra low power transmissions and unmatchable robustness to multiple access interference. WideMac takes advantage of these two key properties by using asynchronous periodic beacon transmissions from each network node, thereby avoiding the need for network-wide clock synchronization and at the same time allowing fast and power efficient neighbour discovery. WideMac power consumption is compared analytically to the state of the art, and it is shown to be on par with the best and close to the optimum on a broad range of traffic rates and network densities. Additionally, WideMac UWB-IR beaconing mechanism offers unique low power neighbour discovery and ranging. Since the operation of distributed routing protocols often heavily depends on such features, it is argued that the performance of a complete UWB-IR communications stack can be greatly improved by choosing WideMac.