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An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Published:05 November 2003Publication History

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe T-MAC, a contention-based Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor networks. Applications for these networks have some characteristics (low message rate, insensitivity to latency) that can be exploited to reduce energy consumption by introducing an activesleep duty cycle. To handle load variations in time and location T-MAC introduces an adaptive duty cycle in a novel way: by dynamically ending the active part of it. This reduces the amount of energy wasted on idle listening, in which nodes wait for potentially incoming messages, while still maintaining a reasonable throughput.We discuss the design of T-MAC, and provide a head-to-head comparison with classic CSMA (no duty cycle) and S-MAC (fixed duty cycle) through extensive simulations. Under homogeneous load, T-MAC and S-MAC achieve similar reductions in energy consumption (up to 98%) compared to CSMA. In a sample scenario with variable load, however, T-MAC outperforms S-MAC by a factor of 5. Preliminary energy-consumption measurements provide insight into the internal workings of the T-MAC protocol.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          SenSys '03: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
          November 2003
          356 pages
          ISBN:1581137079
          DOI:10.1145/958491

          Copyright © 2003 ACM

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 5 November 2003

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          Acceptance Rates

          SenSys '03 Paper Acceptance Rate24of137submissions,18%Overall Acceptance Rate174of867submissions,20%

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