ATMA: Advertisement-Based TDMA Protocol for Bursty Traffic in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation is one of the primary goals of the majority of MAC protocols designed for wireless sensor networks. In Sensor-MAC (S-MAC), one of the first MAC protocols designed for sensor networks, nodes sleep and wake up periodically to save energy. MAC protocols such as Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) and Advertisement-MAC (ADV-MAC) improved upon S-MAC by introducing support for variable loads and providing further energy savings. In event-driven networks with sources generating bursty traffic or networks with period traffic, we can further reduce the energy consumption and increase node lifetime if we take into account the nature of the traffic. In this paper we propose Advertisement-based Time-division Multiple Access, or ATMA, a distributed TDMA-based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks that utilizes the bursty or periodic nature of the traffic to prevent energy waste through advertisements and reservations for data slots. We provide detailed comparisons of the ATMA protocol with S-MAC, T-MAC and ADV-MAC through extensive simulations. The simulation results show that in bursty or periodic traffics, ATMA outperforms S-MAC, T-MAC and ADV-MAC in terms of energy consumption with reductions of up to 75%, while faring as well as T-MAC and ADV-MAC in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency.