Energy Efficient Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol plays vital role for improving the efficiency of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Thus, several energy efficient MAC protocols are introduced for better outcomes. This paper introduces an energy efficient Medium Access Control (EE-MAC) protocol for WSNs. EE-MAC handles idle listening and congestion problem to preserve the energy. EE-MAC uses semi synchronous low duty cycle that takes less time for channel access. As a result, higher data delivery rate is expected, and extra energy is preserved. Evaluation of EE-MAC is performed using network simulator-3 (ns3) then compared with X-MAC (low duty cycles energy efficient protocol) and low power listening (LPL). We compared BN-MAC with MAC hybrid protocols: Speck-MAC, Boarder Node MAC (BN-MAC), advertisement-based MAC (A-MAC), Adaptive Duty Cycle SMAC (ADC-SMAC) and low power real-time MAC (LPR-MAC) protocol. Based on initial experimental results, we demonstrate that EE-MAC protocol saves additional 2% to 4.5% energy as compared with other MAC protocols.