Performance enhancement of low power listening MAC for duty cycled wireless sensor networks

Recently low power listening (LPL) MAC protocols based on duty-cycling mechanism have been studied extensively to achieve ultra low energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, state-of-the-art LPL scheme still suffers from some performance degradation due to its own protocol incompleteness. In this paper, we propose the tau-duration CCA method to mitigate the collision probability in ACK-based LPL MAC protocol and show its performance improvement via analytical and experimental results. Our performance study indicates that ACK-based LPL MAC protocol which adopts the tau-duration CCA is significantly better than normal ACK-based LPL MAC protocol in terms of energy consumption.