Adaptive MAC Protocol for Solar Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture

Abstract

The wireless sensor network is one of the promising technologies in the agriculture field. Its actual usage in real agriculture fields is limited by its dependence on the small batteries which cannot make the network survive for long. Various protocols are being designed at the network and MAC layer to increase the lifetime of the nodes, but up to a certain extent only. Hence the energy harvesting to power up the WSN nodes is a promising technology to fulfill this ever energy demand, but the protocols need to be redesigned for this scenario. Solar energy harvesting based MAC protocol which is adaptive to the changing weather conditions is designed in this paper for the smart agriculture applications. It is based on the multilayer and receiver-initiated process to improve network quality. It has shown the remarkable performance over the other energy harvesting based protocols in terms of ENO ratio, energy consumption and collision rate.