A Low Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network in Agriculture Canopy Monitoring

Deployment of wireless sensor network (WSN) in agriculture canopy to monitor the light, soil temperature, atmosphere temperature and humidity is helpful to control the parameters and improve the land utilization ratio and productivity. To maximize the network lifetime, the underlined media access control (MAC) protocol should be designed to be power efficient. This paper present a synchronous rich preamble listening (SRPL) protocol for WSN deployed in the agriculture canopy. To reduce the power consumption, SRPL uses a rich preamble design that embeds both the destination address and the schedule synchronization information into the preamble. Compared with the traditional low power listening protocol, SRPL improves the power efficiency by reducing overhearing cost on unintended nodes and saves more energy by shortening the preamble length. Both the analytical result and the deployment experiment validate the rich preamble and protocol design.