Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Broadcasting in Asynchronous Low Duty Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Computer Engineering

Synchronizing data communication between nodes with energy efficiency by adapting different low duty cycling mechanisms is the most important task of the Medium Access Control Protocol (MAC) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Most of the low duty cycle MAC protocols address the issue of unicast efficiently, ignoring the broadcast performance which presents significant challenges due to the duty cycling. In this paper we propose first the work, an asynchronous low duty cycle MAC protocol for broadcasts in WSN that would incorporate the advantages of existing sender initiated and receiver-initiated MAC protocols. The Preamble based Receiver-Initiated Broadcast MAC (PRIB-MAC) protocol is built on RIMAC (Receiver Initiated MAC), a unicast MAC protocol by adding a preamble to support broadcasting. It is found that the duration of the preamble depends on the time difference in the wake-up schedule of the nodes and with an optimized wake-up schedule the preamble duration of just 2% of the slot duration can give 100% node coverage in a very less time compared to Asynchronous Duty-cycle Broadcasting (ADB): an efficient multihop broadcast protocol based on asynchronous duty cycling in WSN. In this paper we propose the second work, the Preamble based Receiver-Initiated Broadcast Connected Dominating Set (PRIB-CDS) is built on top of PRIB-MAC with the addition of dynamic forwarding technique by forming a forwarding set with the help of the Greedy algorithm. The simulation results of the proposed PRIB-CDS algorithm shows that it has reduced the number of transmissions significantly as it reduces forwarding nodes and balances the energy between the nodes to avoid re-broadcasting the data. Self-organizing multi-hop networks necessitate the broadcast of the data for data dissemination, generally achieved by flooding methods that suffer from issues like retransmission, contention and collisions. The second work PRIB-CDS solved some of these issues but had scope for improvement in reducing contention.

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