A Novel Low-Complexity Low-Latency Power Efficient Collision Detection Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Collision detection mechanisms in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have largely been revolving around direct demodulation and decoding of received packets and deciding on a collision based on some form of a frame error detection mechanism, such as a CRC check. The obvious drawback of full detection of a received packet is the need to expend a significant amount of energy and processing complexity in order to fully decode a packet, only to discover the packet is illegible due to a collision. In this paper, we propose a suite of novel, yet simple and power-efficient algorithms to detect a collision without the need for full-decoding of the received packet. Our novel algorithms aim at detecting collision through fast examination of the signal statistics of a short snippet of the received packet via a relatively small number of computations over a small number of received IQ samples. Hence, the proposed algorithms operate directly at the output of the receiver's analog-to-digital converter and eliminate the need to pass the signal through the entire. In addition, we present a complexity and power-saving comparison between our novel algorithms and conventional full-decoding (for select coding schemes) to demonstrate the significant power and complexity saving advantage of our algorithms.