Dual Wake-up Low Power Listening for Duty Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy management is an interesting research area for wireless sensor networks. Relevant dutycycling (or sleep scheduling) algorithm has been actively studied at MAC, routing, and application levels. Low power listening (LPL) MAC is one of effective dutycycling techniques. This paper proposes a novel approach called dual wake-up LPL (DW-LPL). Existing LPL scheme uses a preamble detection method for both broadcast and unicast, thus suffers from severe overhearing problem at unicast transmission. DW-LPL uses a different wake-up method for unicast while using LPL-like method for broadcast; DW-LPL introduces a receiver-initiated method in which a sender waits a signal from receiver to start unicast transmission, which incurs some signaling overhead but supports flexible adaptive listening as well as overhearing removal effect. Through analysis and Mote (Telosb) experiment, we show that DW-LPL provides more energy saving than LPL and our adaptive listening scheme is effective for energy conservation in practical network topologies and traffic patterns.