An adaptive polling interval and short preamble media access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Media access control (MAC) protocols control how nodes access a shared wireless channel. It is critical to the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN). An adaptive polling interval and short preamble MAC protocol (AX-MAC) is proposed in this paper. AXMAC is an asynchronous protocol which composed of two basic features. First, rendezvous between the sender and the receiver is reached by a series of short preambles. Second, nodes dynamically adjust their polling intervals according to network traffic conditions. Threshold parameters used to determine traffic conditions and adjust polling intervals are analyzed based on a Markov chain. Energy consumption and network latency are also discussed in detail. Simulation results indicate that AXMAC is suited to dynamic network traffic conditions and is superior to both X-MAC and Boost-MAC in energy consumption and latency.