A Preamble Sampling Scheme Based MAC Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The operation of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with limited energy resources is an important challenge for researchers. In fact, many schemes have been proposed to save the wasted energy in a WSN or to equip its sensor nodes with an energy harvesting system. In this paper, we propose a preamble sampling scheme based MAC protocol for energy harvesting WSNs (PS-EHWSN). PS-EHWSN leverages the advantage of transmitter-initiated schemes and uses the low power listening (LPL) technique with short preamble messages where each sensor node in the network can determine its next sleep period to reduce the duty-cycle by the use of its residual energy, which can increase over time. Moreover, our proposition promotes even energy consumption of the sensor nodes with the energy harvesting capability. PS-EHWSN protocol was simulated using OMNeT++/MiXiM. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol exceeds some existing MAC protocols such as the BMAC.