Taking Advantage of Overhearing in Low Power Listening WSNs: A Performance Analysis of the LWT-MAC Protocol

LWT-MAC is a new Low Power Listening MAC protocol for WSNs designed to rapidly react to instantaneous increases of the network load. It takes advantage of overhearing by waking up all nodes at the end of a transmission to send or receive packets without needing to transmit the long preamble before. In this work, detailed analytical models of the LWT-MAC and B-MAC protocols, for both saturated and unsaturated conditions, are presented. Moreover, the key LWT-MAC parameters are optimized in order to minimize the energy consumption, constrained to obtain the same throughput as the IEEE 802.11 (CSMA/CA) MAC protocol. From the behavior of the optimal LWT-MAC parameters, a heuristic configuration is proposed. Finally, the LWT-MAC is compared to B-MAC, in both single and multi-hop scenarios, showing improvements in energy consumption, throughput and delay.