RIX-MAC: An Energy-Efficient Receiver-Initiated Wakeup MAC Protocol for WSNs

Abstract

This paper proposes RIX-MAC (Receiver-Initiated X-MAC), a new energy-efficient MAC protocol based on an asynchronous duty cycling. RIX-MAC improves energy efficiency through utilizing short preambles and adopting the receiver-initiated approach, where RIX-MAC minimizes sender nodes' energy consumption by enabling transmitters to predict receiver nodes' wake-up times. It also reduces receiver nodes' energy consumption by decreasing the number of control frames. We use the network simulator to evaluate RIX-MAC's performance. Compared to the prior asynchronous duty cycling approaches of X-MAC and PW-MAC, the proposed protocol shows a remarkable improvement in energy-efficiency and end-to-end delay.