AMAC: Traffic-Adaptive Sensor Network MAC Protocol through Variable Duty-Cycle Operations

Sensor network MAC protocols usually employ periodic sleep and wakeup, achieving low duty-cycle to save energy and to increase the lifetime of battery-powered sensor devices. However, existing protocols require all the sensor nodes to operate on the same static schedule, waking up all the nodes at the same fixed interval periodically. This paper proposes a new media access control protocol called AMAC that can achieve significant energy savings by dynamically changing the schedule of each node depending on the traffic. In AMAC, each node can adjust the duration of the periodic interval as well as the duration of the active period depending on the traffic. Thus, busy nodes can operate with a high duty-cycle while idle nodes can operate with a low duty-cycle at the same time, achieving both low-energy and high-performance. The results of our detailed simulations confirm that AMAC can reduce the average energy consumption by a factor of up to 6.8 compared to an existing fixed duty-cycle MAC protocol while it can also improve the network performance for burst traffic patterns.

[1]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Medium access control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor networks , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[2]  Wendi Heinzelman,et al.  Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences- 2000 Energy-Efficient Communication Protocol for Wireless Microsensor Networks , 2022 .

[3]  Chunming Qiao,et al.  Medium access control with a dynamic duty cycle for sensor networks , 2004, 2004 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8733).

[4]  Nader F. Mir,et al.  A Self-Organizing Wireless Sensor Network , 2004, ESA/VLSI.

[5]  Christian C. Enz,et al.  WiseNET: an ultralow-power wireless sensor network solution , 2004, Computer.

[6]  Krishna M. Sivalingam,et al.  A multi-layered architecture and protocols for large-scale wireless sensor networks , 2003, 2003 IEEE 58th Vehicular Technology Conference. VTC 2003-Fall (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37484).

[7]  Koen Langendoen,et al.  An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2003, SenSys '03.

[8]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[9]  David E. Culler,et al.  A transmission control scheme for media access in sensor networks , 2001, MobiCom '01.