ENERGY USAGE REDUCTION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS USING ASYNCHRONOUS DUTY CYCLE MAC PROTOCOL

Recent advances in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have led to many new protocols specifically designed for different kinds of applications where energy efficiency is an essential consideration. Most of the attention has been given to the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols since they play an important role in wireless communications. The sensor networks are efficient, when the nodes are inactive for long time but becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These sensor nodes majorly depend on batteries for energy, which get depleted at a faster rate because of the computation and communication operations they have to perform. Wireless sensors networks performance are strictly related to the medium access mechanism. Therefore, to prolonging the network lifetime, we are in need of a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that is able to improve energy efficiency by minimizing idle listening. Duty cycling is a widely used mechanism to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a Wake up Time-Aware (WTA) asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol provides a solution for reducing idle listening time. It adopts a data arrival rate to determine the next wake up times. As the next wake up time of the receiver is known in prior then there is no need for a sender to wake up for a long time. The performance of proposed protocol is compared with that of RI-MAC and pseudo random asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol