EE-MAC: Energy efficient sensor MAC layer protocol

Abstract

Energy efficiency is of utmost importance for wireless sensor networks deployed without any possibility of battery replenishments. Thus, design of energy efficient algorithms and protocols must consider resource constraints while maintaining the desired level of QoS. In this paper, we present EE-MAC, an Energy Efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for distributed wireless sensor networks. EE-MAC achieves a low-duty-cycle and hence low energy consumption through optimized sleep intervals while transitioning between sleep and active states. We consider a weighted linear combination of delay and energy saving as the performance metrics and through extensive simulations, we observe reduced energy consumption at the cost of increased delay. EE-MAC also improves the delay performance for fixed number of nodes compared to S-MAC.