An energy efficient MAC protocol for cluster based event driven WSN applications

Energy efficiency is one of the most important design criteria for long lasting WSN applications. There are many interesting works related to Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols proposed for low energy consumption and high system performance in the literature. TDMA based MAC protocols are more energy-efficient than their traditional contention based counterparts. However, conventional TDMA based MAC protocols are not well suited to the event driven WSN applications. There are some MAC protocols allocating time slots to only source nodes. The distinctive feature of our proposed MAC protocol is that it assigns a time slot to only one of the source nodes all with the same data sensed and to be sent. Thus it reduces data transmission redundancy and achieves energy savings. The analytical performance metrics and expressions are obtained for the proposed MAC protocol and its performance is compared to the conventional TDMA, E-TDMA, BMA and EA-TDMA protocols.