On the improvement of receiver-initiated MAC protocols for WSNs by applying scheduling

The two main drawbacks of receiver-initiated Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are that i) they require all nodes to send a beacon each time they wake up, and that ii) broadcast traffic is not efficiently supported. In this work, we propose addressing these limitations by extending receiver-initiated MAC protocols with scheduling, i.e, coordinating sensor nodes to wake up at nearly the same instant. Following this approach, only one sensor node in the neighborhood sends a beacon per wake-up period and, as all nodes are awake at the same time, broadcast transmissions are naturally supported. A distributed learning technique is used to establish the order of beacon transmissions. We present the protocol description and the time to convergence when a fully connected network is considered.