Hardware Filtering of Non-Intended Frames for Energy Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Communication is responsible for the majority of energy consumption in typical wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While transmission energy can be controlled at each node, reception energy is outside the control of the nodes because they usually do not know the arrival time of their packets and they cannot avoid overhearing packets directed to the other nodes in range. Energy-aware MAC protocols apply duty-cycling which keeps the radio module off for most of the time and wakes it up periodically, but they suffer from overhearing which has been addressed so far either by means of preambles or by means of separate wake-up channels. This paper proposes a complementary approach which exploits the hardware frame filtering capabilities provided by state-of-the-art radio transceivers. Extensive experiments performed on VirtualSense motes show that hardware frame filtering saves more than 50% of the energy spent in the reception of non-intended packets.