An Energy Conservation MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. Because of the limitation of battery power in the sensor nodes, energy conservation is a crucial issue in wireless sensor networks. Consequently, there is much literature presenting energy-efficient MAC protocols based on active/sleep duty cycle mechanisms to conserve energy. Convergecast is a common communication pattern across many sensor network applications featuring data gathering from many different source nodes to a single sink node. This leads to high data collision rates, high energy consumption, and low throughput near the sink node. This paper proposes an efficient slot reservation MAC protocol to reduce energy consumption and to make transmission more efficient in data gathering wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that our protocol provides high throughput, low delivery latency and low energy consumption compared to other methods.