A time tree medium access control for energy efficiency and collision avoidance in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a medium access control and scheduling scheme for wireless sensor networks. It uses time trees for sending data from the sensor node to the base station. For an energy efficient operation of the sensor networks in a distributed manner, time trees are built in order to reduce the collision probability and to minimize the total energy required to send data to the base station. A time tree is a data gathering tree where the base station is the root and each sensor node is either a relaying or a leaf node of the tree. Each tree operates in a different time schedule with possibly different activation rates. Through the simulation, the proposed scheme that uses time trees shows better characteristics toward burst traffic than the previous energy and data arrival rate scheme. © 2010 by the authors.