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.