Variable-base tacit communication: a new energy efficient communication scheme for sensor networks

Abstract

Energy conservation is a major concern in wireless sensor networking. Conventionally in wireless communications, each bit transmitted by a node consumes one unit of energy. Some recent advances, however, explore silent time intervals between signal transmissions to convey information (Zhu and Sivakumar [1]). Such a scheme of Communication through Silence (CtS), while reducing energy consumption for sensor nodes, introduces long delay. In this paper, we propose Variable-Base Tacit Communication (VarBaTaC) to mitigate the delay introduced by CtS. We also develop three MAC protocols based on VarBaTaC for different environments. We then outline experiment designs for further investigations and point out some interesting future research directions.