A scalable energy efficient medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a scalable energy efficient medium access control protocol (SEMAC) based on time division multiple access (TDMA) technique for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which uses the local information in scheduling, eliminates most collisions, is more energy efficient and is scalable to the number of sensor nodes in WSN. SEMAC uses the concept of periodic listen and sleep in order to avoid idle listening and overhearing. To balance the energy used in the whole network, SEMAC lets the node with lower energy be a winner in an election procedure based on their energy levels and the winner has more chances to sleep to save energy. We also use a clustering algorithm to form clusters so as to increase the scalability of SEMAC. The performance of SEMAC is evaluated by simulations, and the results show the gain in energy efficiency and scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.