Performance Evaluation of Traffic Adaptive Sleep based MAC in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a traffic adaptive sleep based medium access control (TAS-MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed. The protocol aims for WSNs which consist of clustered sensor nodes and is based on TDMA-like schema. It is a typical schedule based mechanism which is adopted in previous protocols such as LEACH and Bit-Map Assisted MAC. The proposed MAC, however, considers unexpected long silent period in which sensor nodes have no data input and events do not happen in monitoring environment. With the simple traffic measurement, the TAS-MAC eliminates scheduling phases consuming energy in previous centralized approaches. A frame structure of the protocol includes three periods, investigation (I), transmission (T), and sleep-period (S). Through the I-period, TAS-MAC aggregates current traffic information from each end node and dynamically decide the length of sleep period to avoid energy waste in long silent period. In spite of the energy efficiency of this approach, the delay of data might increase. Thus, we propose an advanced version of TAS-MAC as well, each node in cluster sends one or more data packets to cluster head during the T-period of a frame. Through simulation, the performance in terms of energy consumption and transmission delay is evaluated. By comparing to BMA-MAC, the results indicate the proposed protocol is more energy efficient with tolerable expense in latency, especially in variable traffic situation.