Energy efficient MAC-protocol with adaptive transmission power scale for WSN

In the current decade, wireless sensor networks are emerging as a peculiar multi-disciplinary research area. Wireless sensor networks are appealing to researchers due to their wide range of application potential in areas such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, and tactical systems. However, lower sensing ranges result in dense networks, which bring the necessity to achieve an efficient medium access control protocol subject to power constraints. As medium access control has a significant effect on the energy consumption, energy efficiency is one of the fundamental research theme in the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks. Sensor networks are expected to be deployed in an adhoc fashion, with nodes remaining largely inactive for long time, but becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in several ways: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. There are plenty of MAC protocols available for wireless sensor networks but SMAC is one of the most popularly used protocol designed specifically for WSN. In this paper, we would compare the performance of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol with S-MAC protocol under NOAH routing protocol on different performance parameters by varying communication range of sensor nodes. Keywords— WSN, MAC, IEEE, SMAC, 802.11