ADP-MAC: An Adaptive and Dynamic Polling-Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Channel polling activity in MAC protocols of wireless sensor network (WSN) significantly governs energy, delay, and lifetime of the network, and therefore, it is required to adjust the polling intervals in accordance with the incoming traffic patterns. In this paper, an asynchronous duty-cycle-based MAC protocol: adaptive and dynamic polling-MAC (ADP-MAC) has been developed. This paper took a novel approach of switching the polling interval distribution of the receiver nodes by monitoring the co-efficient of variation of the incoming traffic. To represent different applications of WSN, constant-bit rate, Poisson, and Bursty arrivals have been used, whereas three types of polling distributions: deterministic, exponential, and dynamic have been studied. The performance parameters, such as energy, delay, and packet loss, are used to evaluate ADP-MAC against an established protocol synchronized channel polling-MAC (SCP-MAC). The major finding of this paper is that when the traffic arrival and polling interval distribution of ADP-MAC are in conformance, the performance in terms of both delay and energy turns out to be the best. Furthermore, ADP-MAC has been found to outperform SCP-MAC for each type of arrivals.