PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF A NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR LOW-POWER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

The tremendous and rapid development in sensors technology allowed their application in various fields requiring monitoring, such as, transportations, rare species surveillance, agriculture, military activities, medical field, etc. Due to their intrinsic constraints and limitations, several dedicated MAC protocols have been designed for wireless sensor networks and whose main objectives are bandwidth optimization while keeping very low energy consumption. One of the newest proposals is ANT which is emerging as a widely used MAC protocol for wellness and sports sensor devices. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of ANT/ANT+ and a comparison between ANT and two established standards: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 802.15.4/4a. We detail also some practical experiments we conducted to evaluate some characteristics of ANT.