An Efficient Distributed Multi-hop Relay Supporting (EDMRS) MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Past few decade have seen an immense growth in demand for mobile access, which has in turn reflected in growth of wireless communication. However, maintaining quality of service in wireless networks has proved to be a challenge to the propagation use of this technology, even though it is cost-effective as compared to wired network technology. The use of multi input multi output (MIMO) systems overcomes the challenge to certain extent; as they contain multiple transmitter and receiver antennas and have been widely acknowledged for their QoS and transmit diversity. Though suited for cellular base stations, MIMO systems are not suited for small sized wireless nodes due their hardware complexity, cost, and increased power requirements. This is reason why MIMO systems have been substituted by cooperative communication; because they allow relays i.e. mobile or fixed nodes in a communication network, to share their resources and forward other node’s data to the destination node. The aim of this paper is to present an efficient multi-hop distributed relay supporting medium access control (MAC) protocol (EDMRS) that works in multi-hop environment and improves the energy efficiency and the life of relay nodes without compensating the throughput of the network. The protocol has been simulated using NS2 simulator. The proposed protocol is compared with energy efficient cooperative MAC protocol and legacy distributed coordination function on the basis of throughput, energy efficiency, transmission delay and end to end delay with various payload sizes. The results thus achieved are indicative of outperformance of the proposed protocol in comparison to other two protocols.