An ultra low power medium access control protocol with the divided preamble sampling

This paper proposes DPS-MAC (Divided Preamble Sampling-MAC), a carrier sense Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol with ultra low power operations for wireless sensor networks. Due to battery-operated computing and sensing devices in wireless sensor networks, the development of MAC protocols that efficiently reduce power consumption is an important issue. DPS-MAC is a novel energy efficient protocol based on sampling preamble segments that have preamble offsets and next hop addresses. By using these parameters, DPS-MAC can overcome the drawbacks of long fixed preambles and overhearing in BMAC. The divided preamble sampling technique provides not only very low power consumption when the channel is idle, but also a chance to avoid overhearing without additional overheads compared to B-MAC. This technique makes it possible to extend the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks that contain a large number of nodes. The experiment results show that DPS-MAC protocol reduces much energy consumed by receiving compared to B-MAC and can support various features of wireless sensor networks efficiently.