Achieving Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Dynamic Channel Polling and Packet Concatenation

There has been a significant interest of researchers to combine different schemes focused on optimizing energy performance while developing a MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose to integrate two cross-layer schemes: dynamic channel polling and packet concatenation using a recent asynchronous MAC protocol "Adaptive & Dynamic Polling MAC" (ADP-MAC). ADP-MAC dynamically selects the polling interval distribution based on characterization of incoming traffic patterns using Coefficient of variation (Cv). Packet Concatenation (PC) refers to combining the individually generated data packets into a single super packet and sending it at the polling instant. Also, the Block Acknowledgement (BA) scheme has been developed for ADP-MAC to work in conjunction with the packet concatenation. The proposed schemes have been implemented in Tiny-OS for Mica2 platform and Avrora emulator has been used for conducting experiments. Simulation results have revealed that the performance both in terms of energy & packet loss improves when ADP-MAC is used in conjunction with the additional features of PC & BA. Furthermore, the proposed scheme has been compared with a state-of-art packet concatenation primitive PiP (Packet-in-Packet). It has been observed that ADP-MAC supersedes the performance of PiP in terms of PDR (Packet Delivery Ratio) due to better management of synchronization between source and sink.