A low power consumption protocol for low power communication devices attached to an asynchronous network is described. In this protocol, one or more mediation devices (MDs) facilitate data processing capabilities in the network, whether in a dedicated MD or distributed MD network environment. These capabilities may be provided by the functions of packet caching, removal of replicated packets, and multiple communication types performed by the one or more MDs in accordance with a common synchronization schedule (2510) managed by the one or more MDs and communicated to other devices in the network (2530).