A MAC protocol with little idle listening for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency is crucial to achieving satisfactory network lifetime. To reduce the energy consumption significantly, a node should turn off its radio as long as possible. We propose a MAC protocol with little idle listening. The sensor node periodically turns on its radio in polling period and checks for a wake-up signal by sampling the energy on the channel. After polling period, the node enters the long sleep period. The data latency is reduced through reserving the channel in polling period. Analyses and simulations reveal that the proposed protocol outperforms S-MAC and LPL in energy conservation and latency.