RP-MAC: A Receiver Preamble MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol (RP-MAC) with a receiver preamble for wireless sensor networks. Energy efficiency is the most critical and fundamental factor in wireless sensor networks, because sensor nodes rely on the limited power source. For energy efficiency, the existing MAC protocols such as B-MAC and X-MAC change the active and sleep states periodically with a duty cycle. Even if these protocols work well in the sleep state, transmission overhead due to the preamble is very large when changing to the active state, because the sender transmits a preamble repetitively. In our approach, the receiver transmits instead a preamble only once, thereby minimizing the overhead. With this concept we implement real source code working on the telosb platform with TinyOS 1.1.15 version. The test results show that the proposed protocol provides better performance in terms of energy efficiency and delay compared to X-MAC.