An Energy-Efficient MAC Design for IEEE 802.15.4-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new energy-efficient MAC design to improve the performance of IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks. Our proposed mechanism adaptively determines the sleeping schedules of sensor nodes based on the network traffic load to achieve the balance of throughput and energy consumption. This mechanism consists of two phases: schedule exchange phase and schedule generation phase. In the schedule exchange phase, the schedule parameters are piggybacked in normal transmissions. In the schedule generation phase, sensor nodes adaptively determine the sleeping schedule from the schedule parameters. Eventually, the schedules of all sensor nodes converge to one schedule. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism achieves sleeping schedule convergence and high energy efficiency.