A scalable and energy-efficient hybrid-based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks
Bashir Yahya, Jalel Ben‐Othman · 2008
The problem of MAC protocol design for wireless sensor networks poses many challenges such as energy constraint resources, strict wireless bandwidth, channel utilization & etc. These challenges make handling changes in network topology and network scalability a major issue. In this paper we present a new scalable and energy efficient hybrid-based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, abbreviated as SEHM. The protocol saves energy by reducing energy consumption due to idle listening and signal interference. Idle listening is reduced by making idle nodes and all nodes that have no data to send to switch early to sleep state. Signal interference is limited through using time division based medium access. Scalability of our approach is achieved through dividing the sensor network into clusters. Clusters are dynamically formed as all nodes in the sensor network are allowed to content for the position of a cluster head, to finally elect suitable cluster heads. The performance of our protocol is studied and analyzed by means of computer simulations, and we show that our approach outperforms S-MAC protocol in terms of energy consumption and packet delivery rate.