Traffic aware duty cycle adaptation for strobed preamble MAC protocols

Abstract

Radio duty cycling is a well-adopted technique deployed in Medium Access Control protocol design for wireless sensor networks that improves energy efficiency. In this paper we address the question of how to select an optimal duty cycle for strobed preamble MAC protocols. We propose and evaluate a distributed algorithm which minimizes the energy consumption of a wireless sensor network through adaptation of the radio duty cycle. Our approach is based on the minimization of the expected energy for the transmission of a message given a certain interarrival time distribution. We deduce generic expressions for the optimal duty cycle configuration independent of the characteristics of the specific interarrival time distribution when the variance of the distribution is large. Furthermore we demonstrate that significant gains in terms of energy consumption can be accomplished with this mechanism.