Lightweight Balanced Power Saving MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
Hanen Idoudi · 2014
Sensors are battery powered devices which are attracting a tremendous attention owing to their wide range of applications. To overcome their intrinsic power limitations, reducing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a critical issue to expand their lifespan. Balancing nodes' activities and duty cycling are efficient ways that could enhance WSN's performances. Yet, most existing works only rely on these mechanisms to optimize energy consumption at MAC layer without taking into account the upper layers overhead. In this paper, we introduce a new power saving mechanism for wireless sensor networks that achieves cross-layer functioning to provide an adaptive duty cycle and a minimum routing overhead. This mechanism relies on two basic functions: an asynchronous duty cycling for nodes' activity balancing and a lightweight geographic routing. We show through several simulations that our proposed approach outperforms existing works in terms of residual energy, energy consumption balancing and packets delivery ratio.