Publication Data
PowerNap: An Energy Efficient MAC Layer for Random Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract: Idle-listening is the biggest challenge for energyefficiency
and longevity of multihop wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments. While existing
coordinated sleep/wakeup scheduling protocols eliminate idle-listening for simple
traffic patterns, they are unsuitable to handle the complex traffic patterns of the
random routing protocols. We present a novel coordinated sleep/wakeup protocol POWERNAP
, which avoids the overhead of distributing complex, large sleep/wakeup scheduling
information to the nodes. POWERNAP piggybacks onto the relayed data packets the seed of
the pseudo-random generator that encodes the scheduling information, and enables any
recipient/snooper to calculate its sleep/wakeup schedule from this seed. In essence,
POWERNAP trades off doing extra computation in order to avoid expensive control packet
transmissions. We show through simulations and real implementation on TelosB motes that
POWERNAP eliminates the idle-listening problem efficiently and achieves selfstabilizing,
low-latency, and low-cost relaying of data packets for random routing protocols.
