An Application Oriented Power Saving MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency has been an important concern in wireless sensor networks where Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol plays an important role. However, current MAC protocols designed for energy saving have seldom considered multiple applications coexisting in WSN with variation of traffic load dynamics. In this paper, we propose an adaptive control algorithm at MAC layer to promote energy efficiency. We focus on the tradeoff relation between collisions and control overhead as a reflection of traffic load and propose to balance the tradeoff under the constraints of QoS options. We integrate the algorithm into S-MAC and verify it through NS-2 platform. The simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves observable improvement in energy performance while meeting QoS requirement for different coexisting applications in comparison with S-MAC.