Energy-efficient, flow-specific medium access using preamble sampling

Current wireless sensor network applications face challenging power constraints that demand low duty cycles. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient, flow-specific medium access scheme that is capable of achieving low duty cycles while taking advantage of the performance improvements available through a flow-specific medium access approach. The scheme is based on an adaptive sleep and wake cycle that responds to changes in both contention and non-contention traffic loads through the use of preamble sampling. A preamble sampling probability parameter is introduced to manage the trade-off between energy efficiency and network throughput and delay performance. A performance analysis is conducted and verified through simulation.