An Efficient Distributed Single-hop Relay Supporting (EDSRS) MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Background & Objective: Wireless communication has immensely grown during the past few decades due to significant demand for mobile access. Although cost-effective as compared to their wired counterpart, maintaining good quality-of-service (QoS) in these networks has always remained a challenge. Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which consists of multiple transmitter and receiver antennas, 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 to their hardware complexity, cost, and increased power requirements. Cooperative communication that allows 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 has substituted the MIMO systems nowadays. To harness the full benefit of cooperative communication, appropriate relay node selection is very important. This paper presents an efficient single-hop distributed relay supporting medium access control (MAC) protocol (EDSRS) that works in the single-hop environment and improves the energy efficiency and the life of relay nodes without compensating the throughput of the network. Methods: The protocol has been simulated using NS2 simulator. The proposed protocol is compared with energy efficient cooperative MAC protocol (EECOMAC) and legacy distributed coordination function (DCF) on the basis of throughput, energy efficiency, transmission delay and an end to end delay with various payload sizes. Result and Conclusion: The result of the comparison indicates that the proposed protocol (EDSRS) outperforms the other two protocols.