Energy Efficient Token Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose on energy efficient token based MAC protocol for WSNs, in order to reduce energy consumption of each sensor node which is one of the important issues to prolong the network lifetime. WSN consists of a large number of small and low-cost sensor nodes powered by small batteries and equipped with various sensing devices. Due to limited energy in WSN energy efficiency is an important factor in designing a MAC protocol. To derogate energy consumption most of the MAC protocols in WSN exploits low duty-cycle; among those RMAC, HEMAC allows a node to transmit data packet for multi-hop in a single duty-cycle. To reduce energy consumption on prolonged network life time sensor networks are usually duty cycled; each node remains in low power sleep mode most of the time and wakes up periodically to sense for channel activities. In all these above MAC protocols, due to the synchronized scheduling, transmission collisions, flooding will increase resulting in energy waste and low throughput. By allowing nodes to operate with a new token-based approach, we intend to produce energy efficiency in an event based approach by reducing flooding, collision and traffic congestion. The work in this paper draws a bed on implementing a token based distributed approach to save energy at in order to mitigate flooding. Simulation studies of the proposed MAC protocol have been carried out using Castalia simulator.