Energy-aware receiver-driven medium access control protocol for wireless energy-harvesting sensor networks

In this paper, we propose an energy-neutral receiver-initiated medium access control (ENRI-MAC) protocol which enables every sensor to autonomously adapt its own duty cycle based on available energy from an attached harvester and the number of sensors in the coverage. This autonomous adaptation suppresses exhaustion of available energy and thus decreases the resulting packet loss rate. To realize the protocol, we further design a feasible circuit outputting power-good (PG) signal when available energy is abundant. We implement ENRI-MAC using Lazurite Sub-GHz which is an off-the-shelf Arduino-compatible board, and both computer simulations and experimental results confirm that ENRI-MAC has advantages over conventional receiver-driven MAC protocols.