A traffic aware, energy efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we focus on the problem of designing an energy efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks and propose a novel scheme, named TEEM (traffic aware, energy efficient MAC). Inspired by the S-MAC protocol, probably the most well-known sensor MAC scheme for energy efficiency, the proposed TEEM is also based on the concept of 'listen/sleep modes cycle'. However, unlike S-MAC where the duration of listen and sleep modes are fixed, our TEEM protocol makes these durations adaptive by utilizing the 'traffic information' of each node, and hence achieves a significant decrease in power consumption. Through implementation in motes sensors, the presented TEEM is evaluated and compared to S-MAC as well as the IEEE 802.11-like protocols.