Increasing the efficiency of preamble sampling protocols for wireless sensor networks

Applications designed for event driven monitoring represent a challenging class of applications for wireless sensor networks. They are a special kind of monitoring applications, since they usually need low data rates, but also require mechanisms for low latency and asynchronous communication. In this paper we will focus on optimizations at the MAC layer that enable low energy consumption when contention-based protocols are adopted. We present B-MAC+, an enhanced version of a widely adopted MAC protocol, and we show that substantial improvements, in terms of network lifetime, can be reached over the original protocol.