The ContikiMAC Radio Duty Cycling Protocol

Low-power wireless devices must keep their radio transceivers off as much as possible to reach a low power consumption, but must wake up often enough to be able to receive communication from their neighbors. This report describes the ContikiMAC radio duty cycling mechanism, the default radio duty cycling mechanism in Contiki 2.5, which uses a power efficient wake-up mechanism with a set of timing constraints to allow device to keep their transceivers off. With ContikiMAC, nodes can participate in network communication yet keep their radios turned off for roughly 99% of the time. This report describes the ContikiMAC mechanism, measures the energy consumption of individual ContikiMAC operations, and evaluates the efficiency of the fast sleep and phase-lock optimizations

The Politecast Communication Primitive for Low-Power Wireless

In low-power wireless networks, nodes need to duty cycle their radio transceivers to achieve a long system lifetime. Counter-intuitively, in such networks broadcast becomes expensive in terms of energy and bandwidth since all neighbors must be woken up to receive broadcast messages. We argue that there is a class of traffic for which broadcast is overkill: periodic redundant transmissions of semi-static information that is already known to all neighbors, such as neighbor and router advertisements. Our experiments show that such traffic can account for as much as 20% of the network power consumption. We argue that this calls for a new communication primitive and present politecast, a communication primitive that allows messages to be sent without explicitly waking neighbors up. We have built two systems based on politecast: a low-power wireless mobile toy and a full-scale low-power wireless network deployment in an art gallery and our experimental results show that politecast can provide up to a four-fold lifetime improvement over broadcast