Proactive Energy-Efficiency: Evaluation of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty-cycle protocols - Sensor-MAC (SMAC), Timeout-MAC (TMAC) and TunableMAC. Although other duty-cycle protocols are reviewed, the aforementioned three protocols are observed in OMNET++ simulator via the Castalia framework. Graphical results are produced which show the energy consumption and throughput as the duty cycle is varied and the variations in results for each of the three protocols are analyzed. The results provide insight into how to ensure `proactive energy-efficiency' whereby the impact of denial-of-sleep attacks can be minimized while throughput is maximized.