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Taking Advantage of Overhearing in Low Power Listening WSNs: A Performance Analysis of the LWT-MAC Protocol

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Abstract

LWT-MAC is a new Low Power Listening MAC protocol for WSNs designed to rapidly react to instantaneous increases of the network load. It takes advantage of overhearing by waking up all nodes at the end of a transmission to send or receive packets without needing to transmit the long preamble before. In this work, detailed analytical models of the LWT-MAC and B-MAC protocols, for both saturated and unsaturated conditions, are presented. Moreover, the key LWT-MAC parameters are optimized in order to minimize the energy consumption, constrained to obtain the same throughput as the IEEE 802.11 (CSMA/CA) MAC protocol. From the behavior of the optimal LWT-MAC parameters, a heuristic configuration is proposed. Finally, the LWT-MAC is compared to B-MAC, in both single and multi-hop scenarios, showing improvements in energy consumption, throughput and delay.

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Notes

  1. The effect of the CA timer previously described has not been studied, it is considered that collisions move the system to the unscheduled mode.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Government under the projects TEC2008-0655/TEC (GEPETO, Plan Nacional I+D) and CSD2008-00010 (COMONSENS, Consolider-Ingenio Program) and by the Catalan Government (SGR2009#00617)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NeTS Research Group, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, C/ Tanger, 122-140, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Cristina Cano, Boris Bellalta, Anna Sfairopoulou, Miquel Oliver & Jaume Barceló

Authors
  1. Cristina Cano
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  2. Boris Bellalta
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  3. Anna Sfairopoulou
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  4. Miquel Oliver
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  5. Jaume Barceló
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Cano.

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Cano, C., Bellalta, B., Sfairopoulou, A. et al. Taking Advantage of Overhearing in Low Power Listening WSNs: A Performance Analysis of the LWT-MAC Protocol. Mobile Netw Appl 16, 613–628 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-010-0280-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-010-0280-4

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