A wireless-sensor-network energy-efficient medium-access-control protocol with overhearing avoidance
Christopher K. Nguyen, A. Kumar · 2006
This paper proposes an energy-efficient medium-accesscontrol (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks with aggressive energy saving without throughput degradation. The proposal provides a throughput and energy-aware solution to the unproductive consumption of energy caused by idle listening and overhearing. The proposed contention-based approach dynamically sets up sleeping and waking time to reduce idle listening and puts a sensor to “nap” to avoid overhearing. The inter-node communication is supported by a synchronization mechanism inherited from the proposed scheme. This built-in synchronization, in turn, serves as an environment friendly to scalability and adaptability. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this throughput-aware approach to solving the energy problem in MAC for wireless sensor networks.