Power Efficient Scheduled-Based Medium Access Control Protocol over Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The flexible use of sensors has made them an attractive device to be deployed in almost every field of life such as health, military and home. Recent advancement in electronics and wireless communications has witnessed the development of low cost-sensor devices. While wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are flexible to use and less costly, they need to be more energy-efficient as they are operated by the battery. Mostly they are deployed in harsh environments where it is very difficult to change the batteries frequently. Several medium access control (MAC) algorithms have been developed for the energy-efficient acquisition of the wireless channel, however, none of them are satisfactory. In this paper, we proposed a medium access control algorithm called MAC-PE. MAC-PE is based on the concept of prioritized frames where prioritized frames are transmitted urgently. In addition, it uses scheduled-based MAC instead of accessing channel randomly. We found MAC-PE (Power-Efficient MAC) was efficient in terms of power consumption without sacrificing on the performance using NS-2.