MAC Protocol with Regression based Dynamic Duty Cycle Feature for Mission Critical Applications in WSN

Wireless sensor networks demand energy efficient and application specific medium access control protocol when deployed in critical areas which are not frequently accessible. In such areas, the residual energy of nodes also become important along with the efficient data delivery. Many techniques using adaptive duty cycle approach are suggested by researchers to improve the data delivery performance of protocols. As low duty cycle introduces delay and high duty cycle causes energy losses in the network so duty cycle adaptation according to the distribution of nodes near event occurring area, traffic behaviour and remaining energy of the nodes may be done for energy saving as well as efficient data delivery performance. After analysing the S-MAC protocol performance in critical scenarios for the residual energy, throughput and packet delivery ratio, this paper suggests an improved mission critical MAC protocol called MC-MAC which uses novel regression based adaptive duty cycle approach. The duty cycle is given by the regression pattern of traffic while considering the performance of SMAC protocol for residual energy, throughput and packet delivery ratio. The analytical model of MC-MAC protocol is given accordingly and the performance analysis shows that the proposed MC-MAC protocol saves 40% energy of whole network and also 20% energy of the critical nodes in the mission critical path till base station, as compared to SMAC protocol. Very few improved MAC protocols provide mechanism to save the residual energy of critical nodes and hence to improve the lifetime of critical path. As MC-MAC protocol considers the throughput and packets delivery ratio (also along with residual energy) for calculating the regression formula for duty cycle based on traffic, so it is better than other critical MAC protocols which does trade-off of energy with throughput and packet delivery ratio. Keywords—Regression based adaptive duty cycle approach; mission critical MAC; analytical model; performance analysis