Competition: Synchronous Transmissions + Channel Sampling = Energy Efficient Event-Triggered Wireless Sensing Systems.

Power efficient Wireless Sensor Networks, able to communicate events with high reliability and low end-to-end latency, have proven to be a valuable component of numerous event-triggered systems applications. To date, the best performance in this direction has been consistently demonstrated by protocols relying on floods of simultaneous transmissions (ex. Glossy and Back-to-Back Robust Flooding). However, while event-triggered systems do not always have events to report, these protocols continue to periodically send floods, resulting in unnecessary spectrum occupation and energy consumption. Moreover, the frequent flooding represents a key obstacle for practical event-triggered applications and standardization. Our paper proposes replacing the floods with Synchronized Channel Sampling (SCS) rounds. This results in a significant reduction in the spectrum usage and energy consumption, while maintaining the same level of reliability and latency in waking the network up in case of an event. Furthermore, SCS seamlessly supports applications where multiple motes can detect events simultaneously.