Energy Efficient Mac Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks: Tdma-based Congestion Avoidance Mac Protocol

If many data packets are generated to transmit at once, the existing TDMA-based protocols in general wireless networks can transfer data packets to the sink node without collision and congestion, because the nodes are scheduled for different time slots in order to communicate with their neighboring nodes. The general TDMA-based schemes should, however, be modi-fied for wireless sensor networks since each node must turn off its radio during idle listening for precious power savings. In this thesis, we propose an enhanced TDMA-based MAC protocol for energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks. The proposed MAC scheme reduces energy consumption by using power gate packet that allows the receive node to predict its schedule of data reception. Through the elaborate analysis and simulation using sensor module, the results show that the proposed scheme meets the requirement for both throughput and power saving.