An energy-conserving access protocol for wireless communication

This paper deals with the design of a communications protocol which operates under an energy constraint, in which the fraction of timeslots in which tags need to be in the active (awake) state is minimized, and the access delay meets the applications constraints. We present a new approach to this problem, a pseudo-random protocol, which combines the fairness from random access protocols with the low energy requirements of classical TDMA. Considering an analytical model as well as simulations of the system behavior for the cases of uniformly and non-uniformly distributed traffic destinations, we show that in addition to fairness, and low energy requirements the proposed protocol provides low access delays