An adaptive mobility aware and energy efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Mobility together with energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks have imposed significant challenges for the medium access control (MAC) protocol design to provide reliable communication with good data rates and low energy consumption. Most of the MAC protocols proposed for wireless sensor networks assume static sensor nodes, which usually causes degradation in network performance in scenarios involving mobile sensors. In this paper, we introduce a mobility aware and energy efficient medium access protocol (shortly abbreviated as MEMAC) for mobile wireless sensor networks. Our MEMAC is based on a hybrid scheme of TDMA and CSMA that informs sensor nodes when to wakeup or when to go to sleep to save energy. Furthermore, MEMAC protocol dynamically adjusts the frame size to enable the protocol to effectively adapt itself to changes in mobility and traffic conditions. Through computer simulations, we evaluate the performance of the MEMAC and compare it against the MMAC protocol. Simulation results have shown that MEMAC outperforms MMAC in terms of energy consumption, packet delivery ratio and average packet delay.