A Hybrid Wakeup Signalling Mechanism for Periodic-Listening MAC Algorithms

The SpeckMAC class of MAC algorithms uses periodic listening on the radio channel for duty-cycling the radio onboard the sensor nodes in order to save energy. There are currently two variants of SpeckMAC: SpeckMAC-B uses wakeup frames as the mechanism for signalling, whereas SpeckMAC-D retransmits data packets. This paper presents a novel hybrid protocol, SpeckMAC-H, which adopts an adaptive approach to improving energy efficiency by selecting the wakeup signalling mechanism depending on the type of packet to be transmitted. The performance of such an approach is evaluated on the Qualnet simulator. The data for the simulation models were derived from experiments on the ProSpeckz hardware prototype. The simulation results for Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-hoc On-Demand Vector Routing (AODV) routing algorithms has demonstrated that SpeckMAC-H does indeed achieve higher energy-efficiency than either SpeckMAC-B and SpeckMAC-D in a majority of the simulated scenarios.