Lifetime Enhancement of Cluster Based Wireless Sensor Network through Energy Efficient MAC Protocol

Abstract

The efficient use of energy is an important performance metric to extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Since major energy consumption of node is due to its transceiver, the design of MAC protocol plays a vital role in sensor network design. In cluster based sensor networks, due to the different functions of member node and cluster head node, the usage of common MAC protocol results increased energy consumption. To overcome this problem, a novel energy efficient hybrid MAC protocol (EEHMAC) for cluster based wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper. The proposed EEHMAC protocol uses E-TDMA (Energy efficient TDMA) for intra-cluster communication and FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access) for inter-cluster communication. IDS (Iterative Deepening Search) based Scheduling algorithm is used for assigning time slot and frequency slot to nodes. Nodes in EEHMAC follow the periodic duty cycle, which reduces the idle listening, and overhearing problems. Simulation results reveal that an average of 18% energy saving is achieved compared to LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustered Hierarchy) protocol and 10% energy is saved in comparison with GH-MAC (Graph theory based Hybrid MAC) protocol. It is evident that delay of EEHMAC is reduced by 17% and throughput is increased by 15% under all traffic conditions. These results demonstrate that EEHMAC performs better than existing MAC protocols in terms of energy efficiency, delay and throughput.