A Threshold-Based MAC Protocol with Energy-Efficiency for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose TB-MAC (Threshold-Based MAC), which has been designed to consider various network traffic conditions while providing energy efficiency in a wireless sensor networks. Existing MAC protocols for sensor networks attempt to solve the energy consumption problem caused by idle listening using an active/sleep duty cycle. Since there are various traffic conditions, however, they may not always provide improvements in energy consumption. Hence, we propose a MAC protocol algorithm that stores data in a buffer and transmits data when the buffer exceeds a threshold value so that energy efficiency is always guaranteed for any network traffic condition. The analytical results show that our proposed algorithm enables significant improvements in energy consumption compared to the existing MAC protocols for sensor networks. key words: sensor networks, MAC protocol, energy-efficiency, buffer threshold