Reliable Energy Aware Multi-Token Based MAC Protocol for WSN

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have accelerated tremendous research efforts with an aim to maximize the lifetime of battery-powered sensor nodes and, by extension, the overall network lifetime. With an objective to prolong the lifetime of WSN, reducing energy consumption turns out to be the most crucial factors for almost all WSN protocols, particularly for the MAC protocol that directly ensures the state of the main energy consumption component, i.e., the radio module. In order to minimize energy consumption, RMAC and HEMAC protocols allow a node to transmit data packets for multi-hop WSN in a single duty-cycle. At the same time, each node remains in low power sleep mode and wakes up periodically to sense for channel activities, i.e., data transmission. But, in token based MAC protocol, depending on the token availability, there is always an end-to-end communication between source and sink one at a time; still it would have high latency time. Hence, different MAC protocols for WSN always have greater challenges towards energy conservation, maintaining low latency time, and fault-tolerant to node failure. To overcome these problems, we present an energy efficient multi-token based MAC protocol that not only extend the network lifetime and maintain the network connectivity but also achieve congestionless, fault-tolerant and reliable data transmission. Simulation studies of the proposed MAC protocol have been carried out using Castalia simulator, and its performance has been compared with that of SMAC, RMAC, and token based MAC protocol. Simulation results also show that the proposed approach has lower energy consumption and higher delivery ratio.