Auto-adaptive MAC for energy-efficient burst transmissions in wireless sensor networks

The medium access control being the main source of energy wastage in wireless sensor networks, energy-efficiency is always kept in mind while designing the communication stack. Especially, versatile preamble-sampling MAC protocols emerged to offer a suitable solution over multiple deployment characteristics. For instance, some works have targeted burst transmissions while others have focused on long-term energy-efficiency for mostly sleeping wireless sensors. In this paper, we observe to what extent versatility applies to dynamic scenarios in which communications do not respect specific paradigms. We show that preamble-sampling protocols lack an optimal configuration for antagonist traffic patterns. We therefore introduce an auto-adaptive algorithm that can adjust its sampling period and preamble length. Our solution is based on a link-by-link negotiation in order to establish energy-efficient communications over certain paths toward the sink station. This mechanism, auto-adapting to the current network traffic, can be used in combination with various preamble-sampling MAC layers, and works for every traffic pattern, being especially energy-efficient during burst transmissions. We particularly studied its association with X-MAC, and observed that energy savings are not accomplished to the cost of reliability.