AT&T Labs Research — Leading Invention, Driving Innovation

This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 2012 , 2012-10-08

{Low Power Listening (LPL) is a widely used asynchronous technique to reduce idle listening energy cost in wireless sensor networks. Early LPL protocols like B-MAC that were designed for bit streaming radios achieve low duty cycle by keeping the radio transceiver awake for short time periods. However, they require a transmitter node to precede a packet transmission with a long preamble. Furthermore, they cannot be used with modern packet radios like widely used IEEE 802.15.4 based radio transceivers, which cannot transmit arbitrarily long preambles. Recent LPL schemes like X-MAC, on the other hand, reduce the length of the preamble and are designed to work with packet radios. However, in order to ensure that a receiver can detect a transmitter's preamble transmission, these schemes need to turn the radio transceiver on for longer time duration than the early schemes like B-MAC. In this paper, we present a novel LPL scheme called QuickMAC, that achieves the best of both worlds---small radio awake periods, compatibility with packet (and bit stream) radios, and short preamble length. From our experiments using TMote sky motes, we show that QuickMAC reduces duty cycle by a factor of about 4 compared to X-MAC. }