Adaptive media access control for energy harvesting — Wireless sensor networks

ODMAC (On-Demand Media Access Control) is a recently proposed MAC protocol designed to support individual duty cycles for Energy Harvesting - Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs). Individual duty cycles are vital for EH-WSNs, because they allow nodes to adapt their energy consumption to the ever-changing environmental energy sources. In this paper, we present an improved and extended version of ODMAC and we analyze it by means of an analytical model that can approximate several performance metrics in an arbitrary network topology. The simulations and the analytical experiments show ODMAC's ability to satisfy three key properties of EH-WSNs: adaptability of energy consumption, distributed energy-aware load balancing and support for different application-specific requirements.