APC-MAC/TA: Adaptive Power Controlled MAC Protocol with Traffic Awareness for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an adaptive power controlled MAC protocol with a traffic-aware scheme specifically designed to reduce both energy and latency in wireless sensor networks. Typically, existing MAC protocols for sensor networks sacrifice latency performance for node energy efficiency. However, some sensor applications for emergencies require rather fast transmissions of sensed data, where we need to consider both energy and latency together. The proposed MAC protocol includes two novel ideas: one is a transmission power control scheme for improving latency in high traffic loads, and the other is a traffic-aware scheme to save more energy in low traffic loads. The transmission power control scheme increases channel utilization by mitigating interference between nodes, and the traffic-aware scheme allows nodes to sleep to reduce idle energy consumption when there are no traffic loads in a network. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol significantly reduces the latency as well as the energy consumption compared to the S-MAC protocol specifically for a large transmission power of nodes and low network traffic.