X-MAC: a short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

Michael Buettner, Gary V. Yee, Eric Anderson, Richard Han

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

1384 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper we present X-MAC, a low power MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Standard MAC protocols developed for duty-cycled WSNs such as BMAC, which is the default MAC protocol for TinyOS, employ an extended preamble and preamble sampling. While this "low power listening" approach is simple, asynchronous, and energy-efficient, the long preamble introduces excess latency at each hop, is suboptimal in terms of energy consumption, and suffers from excess energy consumption at nontarget receivers. X-MAC proposes solutions to each of these problems by employing a shortened preamble approach that retains the advantages of low power listening, namely low power communication, simplicity and a decoupling of transmitter and receiver sleep schedules. We demonstrate through implementation and evaluation in a wireless sensor testbed that X-MAC's shortened preamble approach significantly reduces energy usage at both the transmitter and receiver, reduces per-hop latency, and offers additional advantages such as flexible adaptation to both bursty and periodic sensor data sources.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSenSys'06: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages307-320
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)1595933433
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
EventSenSys'06: 4th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems - Boulder, CO, United States
Duration: 31 Oct 20063 Nov 2006

Conference

ConferenceSenSys'06: 4th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoulder, CO
Period31/10/063/11/06

Keywords

  • Media Access Protocols
  • Energy Efficient Operation
  • Low Power Listening
  • Adaptive Duty Cycling
  • Networking
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

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