Poster Abstract: WiseMAC, an Ultra Low Power MAC Protocol for the WiseNET Wireless Sensor Network

WiseMAC is a medium access control protocol designed for the WiseNETwireless sensor network. It is based on CSMA and uses the preamble sampling technique to minimize the power consumed when listening to an idle medium. A unique feature of this protocol is to exploit the knowledge of the sampling schedule of its direct neighbors in order to use a wake-up preamble of minimized size. This scheme allows not only to reduce the transmit and the receive power consumption, but also brings a drastic reduction of the energy wasted due to overhearing. Backoff and medium reservation schemes have been selected to provide fairness and collision avoidance. WiseMAC requires no set-up signaling, no network-wide time synchronization and is adaptive to the traffic load. It provides an ultra-low average power consumption in low traffic conditions and a high energy efficiency in high traffic conditions.