Distributed Energy Aware MAC Layer Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the fact that sensor nodes are untethered and unattended, energy management is a critical issue in communication mechanism of a wireless sensor network. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a novel solution based on media access control technique. Our protocol DE-MAC exploits the inherent features of TDMA to avoid the main sources of energy wastage: collision and control packet overhead. It uses the concept of periodic listen and sleep in order to avoid idle listening and overhearing. However, unlike existing MAC-layer protocols, DE-MAC treats the critical nodes differently in a distributed manner. Motivated by the fact that a weaker node should be used less frequently in a routing in order to accomplish load balancing, DE-MAC performs a local election procedure and chooses the worstoff node/nodes as the winner/winners and makes them sleep more than the other neighboring nodes. Since the election procedure is fully integrated with the TDMA slot assignment, our pro...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICWN
• Authors: Ramaraju Kalidindi, Rajgopal Kannan, S. Sitharama Iyengar, Lydia Ray
• Keywords: Election Procedure, ICWN 2003, ICWN 2007, Sensor Nodes, Wireless Sensor Network