Energy Efficient Medium Access Control for Ultra Wide Band Cluster-based Sensor Network

It is essential for UWB wireless sensor networks to have energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol due to sensor nodes with highly energy constrained. In this paper, a novel energy efficient MAC protocol for UWB cluster-based wireless sensor networks is proposed. Our proposed MAC protocol makes use of some parameters of physical layer of UWB, such as the number of pluses per data bit, three kinds of time hopping (TH) codes. The analysis in theory indicates that decreasing the number of pluses per data bit can reduce energy dissipation and that adopting three kinds of TH codes can avoid collision. The communication between the cluster head and the sink node is also considered in our proposed MAC protocol by ACK packet with busy or idle flag and duration field.