Fuzzy logic optimisation of MAC parameters and sleeping duty-cycles in wireless sensor networks

Quality-of-Service, fairness, low power consumption, low latency and high throughput are all desirable attributes of medium access control (MAC) protocols. MAC protocols for sensor networks are designed with one principal attribute in mind - low power consumption. Minimizing power usage becomes the principal objective of MAC protocol design. This paper proposes FuzzyMAC, a CSMA/CA based MAC protocol that utilizes two separate fuzzy logic controllers to optimize both, MAC parameters and a sleeping schedule duty-cycle. A second fuzzy logic controller attempts to optimize the size of the contention window using three performance metrics as inputs. The primary goal of both fuzzy logic controllers is to ensure maximum power efficiency of the network, which is demonstrated by the results. However, some increased latency results from the adaptive sleeping clycles.