Micro-Frame Preamble MAC for Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

MAC protocols based on preamble sampling techniques like WiseMAC and BMAC offer significant energy savings for multihop wireless sensor networks. Although preamble sampling based techniques efficiently reduce idle listening in low-rate data networks, they introduce extra overhead due to possible reception of some irrelevant frames. In this paper, we identify the problem of receiving irrelevant frames and propose to replace the continuous preamble by a series of small frames that we call micro-frames. The resulting Micro-Frame Preamble (MFP) scheme makes it possible for a node to switch its radio off to avoid receiving irrelevant frames and improve energy savings. In the paper, we evaluate the theoretical energy savings of MFP compared with traditional preamble sampling techniques. We also discuss some experiences with our implementation of MFP on the Freescale MC13192 SARD.