Energy-efficient Aggregation-aware IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol for Railway, Tele-medicine & Industrial Applications

IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol utilizes superframe structure for the data transmission in an energy-efficient manner. In industrial applications, data generation rate of sensor nodes is abrupt in nature. Due to which, buffer overflow is started in few of the sensor nodes and hence overall throughput decreases. A new algorithm has been proposed in the present work for IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC protocol to handle abrupt data generation rate efficiently and to avoid buffer overflow. Proposed algorithm utilizes K-means based aggregation function to halt buffer overflow. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm beats the standard IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in terms of percentage throughput and energy consumption with low mean square error (MSE).