Title: A traffic aware, energy-efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors: Haigang Gong, Jiannong Cao, Ming Liu, Lijun Chen, Li Xie

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan Province, 610054, PR China. ' Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, PR China. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210093, PR China. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210093, PR China. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Jiangsu Province, 210093, PR China

Abstract: In this paper, we propose TA-MAC, a traffic load adaptive, energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). TA-MAC modifies the contention window mechanism of S-MAC, a mostly well-known MAC scheme for sensor networks. Each sensor node chooses an optimal size of initial contention window according to the number of its neighbours. Then, it adjusts the initial contention window according to the current traffic load to reduce the collision probability while employing a fast back-off scheme to reduce the time for idle listening during back-off procedure, which both reduce the energy consumption. Simulation results show that TA-MAC outperforms S-MAC under high load.

Keywords: traffic adaptive protocol; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; MAC protocol; contention windows; energy efficiency; medium access control; wireless networks; traffic load; collision avoidance; back-off scheme; idle listening; energy consumption; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2009.024517

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2009 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.148 - 156

Published online: 08 Apr 2009 *

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