Abstract Frames for Reducing Overhearing in Wireless Sensor Networks.

We present a novel idea for energy saving by avoiding the reception of redundant broadcast frames. It is based on sending an abstract frame just before a data frame: the former contains a digest of the latter. We evaluate the energy savings of this scheme analytically and by means of simulation in ns-2. Although we have applied our approach to SMAC, the key idea is generic and can be used to reduce energy consumed by broadcast frames in a large variety of MAC protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]