SESAM: A semi-synchronous, energy savvy, application-aware MAC

In spite of the huge recent research effort in the field, energy efficiency remains one of the key issues in wireless communications. The area most affected by energy inefficiency is wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this paper we propose SESAM - a distributed MAC protocol, which, making use of application level information to predict future transmission instants between nodes, achieves an exceptional level of energy conservation.The protocol is most suited for low-bit-rate applications, or, more precisely, for applications and networking scenarios where the per-node transmission channel utilization is low. These are the only conditions under which energy consumption is a concern: in other conditions energy consumption is not dominated by transmission and reception of useful data. A simple energy consumption model, supported by initial simulation results, shows very encouraging results, with energy consumption much smaller than with state-of-the art protocols.