A New MAC Protocol for Moving Target in Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of many nodes with limited power supply; most nodes are stationary in the network which could probably involve a few mobile nodes. Various medium access control (MAC) protocols specially aimed at a target locating application for WSNs have been proposed. However, most of these protocols based on the problem of energy-limited does not consider the mobility of nodes. Therefore, in order to solve such problem, this paper proposes a MAC protocol—Distribute Moving-MAC (DM-MAC). Under the condition of keeping high network coverage, the protocol utilizes the redundancy of nodes to strengthen the robustness and energy efficiency of network, and decreases the packet loss rate of the mobile node’s communication links for realizing reliable communication of two nodes. Simulation indicates that the new protocol has higher energy efficiency, lower packet loss rate and higher network coverage which suit for wireless sensor network with mobile nodes well.