MDA-SMAC: An Energy-Efficient Improved SMAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In sensor medium access control (SMAC) protocol, sensor nodes can only access the channel in the scheduling and listening period. However, this fixed working method may generate data latency and high conflict. To solve those problems, scheduling duty in the original SMAC protocol is divided into multiple small scheduling duties (micro duty MD). By applying different micro-dispersed contention channel, sensor nodes can reduce the collision probability of the data and thereby save energy. Based on the given micro-duty, this paper presents an adaptive duty cycle (DC) and back-off algorithm, aiming at detecting the fixed duty cycle in SMAC protocol. According to the given buffer queue length, sensor nodes dynamically change the duty cycle. In the context of low duty cycle and low flow, fair binary exponential back-off (F-BEB) algorithm is applied to reduce data latency. In the context of high duty cycle and high flow, capture avoidance binary exponential back-off (CA-BEB) algorithm is used to further reduce the conflict probability for saving energy consumption. Based on the above two contexts, we propose an improved SMAC protocol, micro duty adaptive SMAC protocol (MDA-SMAC). Comparing the performance between MDA-SMAC protocol and SMAC protocol on the NS-2 simulation platform, the results show that, MDA-SMAC protocol performs better in terms of energy consumption, latency and effective throughput than SMAC protocol, especially in the condition of more crowded network traffic and more sensor nodes.