Adaptive multi-timeslot allocation in an enhanced lightweight medium access protocol for wireless sensor network

Abstract

We propose an enhanced lightweight medium access control (eL-MAC) protocol which combines scheduled based MAC mechanism and adaptive multi-timeslot allocation (AMTA). Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of tiny wireless devices typically cooperate with each other to aggregate sensor data to the base station. It is increasingly being used in a wide range of environmental application. Such applications like habitat monitoring, large-scale industrial monitoring and urban population monitoring require years of operation period with low rate data transmission. Hence, providing a reliable data transmission and efficiency in energy usage are critical in order to prolong the network lifetime. eL-MAC solves the problems that normally happen in WSN such as idle listening, over hearing and hidden terminal problem, by introducing a slotting communication mechanism where node only transmits in its own timeslot and sleep in other time slot if there is no activity. Furthermore, eL-MAC allows multiple timeslots to be occupied by a node according to the traffic requirement. The simulation result shows our protocol prolongs the network lifetime compared to LMAC mechanism, without reducing the channel utilization.