SEA-MAC: A Simple Energy Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

In this paper, we propose SEA-MAC, a new energy aware medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring applications. The proposed MAC scheme is specifically designed for wireless sensor networks which have periodic traffic. In our MAC scheme, the duty cycle is shortened by making nodes wake up only when an environmental sample is taken. Also in SEA-MAC, only the base station can start and maintain synchronization. Consequently, the synchronization is unique in the whole network. The proposed SEA-MAC protocol is tested using simulations and real measurements on the implementations using mica2 motes