Energy-Aware MAC Protocol to Extend Network Lifetime in Asynchronous MAC-Based WSNs

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor nodes consume their limited battery energy to send and receive data packets for data transmission. If some sensor nodes transmit data packets more frequently due to imbalance in the network topology or traffic flows, they experience higher energy consumption. And if the sensor nodes are not recharged, they will be turned off from the lack of battery energy which will degrade network sustainability. In order to resolve this problem, this paper proposes an Energy-aware MAC Protocol (EMP), which adaptively decides on the size of the channel polling cycle consisting of the sleep state (not to communicate with its target node) and the listening state (to awaken to receive data packets), according to the network traffic condition. Moreover, in accordance with the remaining energy state of the sensor node, the minimum size of the channel polling cycle is increased for better energy saving. For performance evaluation and comparison, we develop a Markov chain-based analytical model and an event-driven simulator. Simulation results show that a sensor node with EMP effectively reduces its energy consumption in imbalanced network condition and traffic flows, while latency somewhat increases under insufficient remaining energy. As a consequence, a holistic perspective for enhanced network sustainability can be studied in consideration of network traffic condition as well as the remaining energy states of sensor nodes.