• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.20-26
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• 2016

A wireless passive sensor network is a network which, by letting RF sources supply energy to sensor nodes, is - at least theoretically - able to live an eternal life without batteries. Due to the technological immaturity, however, a wireless passive sensor network still has many difficulties; energy scarcity, non-simultaneity of energy reception and data transmission and inefficiency in data transmission occurring at sensor nodes. Considering such practical constraints, in this paper, we propose an elementary MAC scheme supporting many sensor nodes to deliver packets to a sink node. Based on a time structure in which a charging interval for charging capacitors by using received and an acting interval for communicating with a sink node are alternately repeated, the proposed MAC scheme delivers packets to a sink node according to slotted ALOHA. In general, a contention-type scheme tends to exhibit relatively low throughput. Thus, we multilaterally evaluate the throughput performance achieved by the proposed MAC scheme using a simulation method. Simulation results show that the network-wide throughput performance can be enhanced by properly setting the length of acting interval.