WiseMAC: An Ultra Low Power MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

WiseMAC is a medium access control protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. This protocol is based on non-persistent CSMA and uses the preamble sampling technique to minimize the power consumed when listening to an idle medium. The novelty in this protocol consists in exploiting the knowledge of the sampling schedule of one’s direct neighbors 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. WiseMAC requires no set-up signalling, no network-wide synchronization and is adaptive to the traffic load. It presents an ultralow power consumption in low traffic conditions and a high energy efficiency in high traffic conditions. The performance of the WiseMAC protocol is evaluated using simulations and mathematical analysis, and compared with S-MAC, T-MAC, CSMA/CA and an ideal protocol.