A Quorum-Based Energy-Saving MAC Protocol Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology 2010-02, Vol.59 (2), p.813-822
• Main Authors: CHAO, Chih-Min, LEE, Yi-Wei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Access methods and protocols, osi model; Access protocols; Access schemes; Applied sciences; Batteries; Battery; data communications; Delay; Direct energy conversion and energy accumulation; Electric batteries; Electrical engineering. Electrical power engineering; Electrical power engineering; Electrochemical conversion: primary and secondary batteries, fuel cells; Exact sciences and technology; Job design; Media Access Protocol; Networks; Operation. Load control. Reliability; Power networks and lines; powersaving protocol; Sensors; Services and terminals of telecommunications; Sleep; Surveillance; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunication traffic; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Telemetry. Remote supervision. Telewarning. Remote control; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Traffic flow; Wireless application protocol; wireless communications; Wireless sensor networks; wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2009.2034970

Wireless sensor networks are mainly designed for environment surveillance, wherein wireless sensor nodes cooperate to get their job done. Generally, wireless sensors are battery powered; therefore, it is crucial for them to efficiently use their battery resources. Most of the existing power-saving protocols achieve power savings by periodically putting sensor nodes to sleep. Such a regular sleep/awake mechanism fails to adjust a sensor node's sleep duration based on its traffic load, thus causing either lower power efficiency or higher latency. Furthermore, sensors may be deployed in hostile environments and may thus unexpectedly fail. Most power-saving protocols do not promptly react to such link breakage, resulting in long transmission delays. In this paper, we propose a quorum-based medium access control (QMAC) protocol that enables sensor nodes to sleep longer under light loads. Since traffic flows toward the sink node in wireless sensor networks, a new concept, i.e., the next-hop group , is also proposed to reduce transmission latency. Simulation results verify that the proposed QMAC saves more energy and keeps the transmission latency low.