EERC-MAC: Energy efficient Receiver Centric MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor network

Abstract

Event-driven based traffic consideration in Wireless Sensor network (WSN) is a new area of research in the field of WSN. A few media access control (MAC) protocol has been proposed to handle the variety of both light and heavy traffic load situation such as RC-MAC which allows switching of modes to handle different traffic loads. In RC-MAC, nodes consume extra energy to stay awake like Receiver Initiated (RI-MAC) MAC, create energy hole in the network at later stages and nodes take large contention window to send data after receiving a beacon. Energy efficiency of sensor nodes should also take into consideration for the better network lifetime. In this paper, we improve energy hole problem of Receiver-Centric MAC(RC-MAC), entitled as EERC-MAC, which has better energy conservation and better throughput than RC-MAC. It uses a beacon technique that lets nodes to get sleep appropriately between data transmission and change the data routing path to avoid energy hole.