An Energy Efficient MAC Protocol Providing Guaranteed Service for Wireless Sensor Network

In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Media Access Control (EE-MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme is designed to save power consumption and guarantee quality-of-service for real-time traffic. EE-MAC uses the superframe structure which is bounded by the transmission of a beacon frame and can have an active and an inactive portion. The active period is divided into the contention free period (CFP) for real-time traffic transmission and the contention access period (CAP) for non-real-time traffic transmission. We propose the exclusively allocated backoff scheme which assigns a unique backoff time value to each real-time node based on bandwidth allocation and admission control. This scheme can avoid collision between real-time nodes by controlling distributed fashion and take effect a statistical time division multiple access. We also propose the algorithm to change the duty cycle adaptively according to channel utilization of media depending on network traffic load. This algorithm can prolong network lifetime by reducing the amount of energy wasted on idle listening.