Achieving energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks using dynamic channel polling and packet concatenation

There has been a significant interest of researchers to combine different schemes focused on optimizing energy performance while developing a MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose to integrate two cross-layer schemes: dynamic channel polling and packet concatenation using a recent asynchronous MAC protocol “Adaptive & Dynamic Polling MAC” (ADPMAC). ADP-MAC dynamically selects the polling interval distribution based on characterization of incoming traffic patterns using Coefficient of variation(C
V
). Packet Concatenation (PC) refers to combining the individually generated data packets into a single super packet and sending it at the polling instant. Also, the Block Acknowledgement (BA) scheme has been developed for ADP-MAC to work in conjunction with the packet concatenation. The proposed schemes have been implemented in Tiny-OS for Mica2 platform and Avrora emulator has been used for conducting experiments. Simulation results have revealed that the performance both in terms of energy & packet loss improves when ADP-MAC is used in conjunction with the additional features of PC & BA. Furthermore, the proposed scheme has been compared with a state of-art packet concatenation primitive PiP (Packet-in-Packet). It has been observed that ADP-MAC supersedes the performance of PiP in terms of PDR (Packet Delivery Ratio) due to better management of synchronization between source and sink.