A MAC Protocol for Energy Efficient Wireless Communication Leveraging Wake-Up Estimations on Sender Data

Abstract

Energy conservation and optimization remains the top researched field for wireless sensor networks, which is one of a subsets and the underlying communication medium for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These constrained IoT devices are mostly battery operated and therefore requires robust and optimized algorithms to improve resources utilization which inherently increases the life-span for these devices without compromising Quality of Service (QoS). The communication radios on these nodes are the most power hogging components. Therefore, a major focus has always been on MAC and cross-layer protocols to optimize the duty cycle of radios for the conservation of energy. This paper presents a unique scheme for dynamically adjusting the duty cycle of nodes based on the arrival of incoming infrequent source node sensor data over which eliminates the need for frequent periodic channel assessment for network activity. The proposed scheme also makes use of ultra-low wakeUp receivers on the receiver nodes to further aid the node in energy conservation. In this paper, we describe the details of our design scheme, implementation and evaluation details in Contiki OS and Cooja simulator. The results are micro-benchmarked with ContikiMAC and X-MAC protocols, and an improvement in radio duty cycle is reported for lighter network traffic.