Power saving and throughput analysis of a novel MAC algorithm in WSN

Recent research activities focus on low power and low cost sensor networks. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) contain hundreds of autonomous sensor nodes which perform a required sensing or monitoring for harsh environments. In designing WSNs, limited power is considered to be the main constraint since frequently recharging a battery for a WSN node is not-feasible. Therefore, efficient utilization of power in WSNs has been addressed and investigated heavily in the literature. In this paper we analyze the performance of a novel power saving algorithm which avoids the rather high computational complexity of existing coding/decoding schemes to qualify the sanity of a packet. In addition, our proposed algorithm reduces the delay incurred in order to buffer and decode a received packet due to its ability to make a fast decision on the sanity of the received packet with low false alarm and miss probabilities which result in low throughput penalty, yet achieves a significant power saving advantage with low-complexity HW. We present simulation performance results on the amount of anticipated power saving versus the incurred throughput penalty and compare with various coding schemes commonly used in WSN's.