Adaptive preamble-sampling techniques for receiver-based medium access control protocols in lossy wireless sensor networks

In preamble-sampling medium access control (PS-MAC) protocols, nodes spend most of their time in sleep mode, and wake up for a short duration every checking interval (CI) to check the channel for an ongoing transmission. To avoid deafness, each data packet is preceded by a preamble with the same length as CI, to make sure that all potential receivers detect the preamble. In this work, the authors extend the idea of receiver-based medium access control (MAC) protocol in which all potential neighbour nodes obtain the data frame. They propose and evaluate adaptive preamble MAC and adaptive sampling MAC in PS-MAC with multiple receiver nodes. The analytical and numerical results demonstrate how proposed adaptive PS-MAC outperforms the state-of-the-art sender-based and receiver-based PS-MAC protocols in terms of energy, while maintaining the comparable reliability in data delivery. In addition, overall lifetime of the involved sensor nodes has increased significantly.