DPR-MAC: Dynamic Polling for Rare Events in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is the most critical aspect of disaster management/rare event detection based Wireless Sensor Networks due to the low probability of event occurrence. For such networks, it is essentially important to guarantee that the nodes be alive when the event occurs. This paper evaluated the influence of using deterministic, exponential and dynamic polling intervals by developing an asynchronous MAC protocol DPR-MAC (Dynamic Polling for Rare events). DPR-MAC has been implemented in Tiny-OS and simulated using Avrora. It has been revealed that exponential and dynamically selected polling intervals can significantly improve the energy performance of DPR-MAC and hence the lifetime of the WSN dedicated for rare event detection applications. Similarly, the transmission delay for the event data is shown to be reduced for DPR-MAC with dynamically selected polling intervals. The results have been compared with SCP-MAC for performance improvement.