An Energy-efficient Rate Adaptive Media Access Protocol (RA-MAC) for Long-lived Sensor Networks

Sensors

Wen Hu¹  Quanjun Chen²  Peter Corke¹ 

[1] ICT Centre, CSIRO, Brisbane 4069, Australia; E-Mails:;School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia; E-Mail:

关键词: wireless sensor networks;    energy efficient;    rate adaptive;    performance evaluation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s100605548

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

We introduce an energy-efficient Rate Adaptive Media Access Control (RA-MAC) algorithm for long-lived Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Previous research shows that the dynamic and lossy nature of wireless communications is one of the major challenges to reliable data delivery in WSNs. RA-MAC achieves high link reliability in such situations by dynamically trading off data rate for channel gain. The extra gain that can be achieved reduces the packet loss rate which contributes to reduced energy expenditure through a reduced numbers of retransmissions. We achieve this at the expense of raw bit rate which generally far exceeds the application’s link requirement. To minimize communication energy consumption, RA-MAC selects the optimal data rate based on the estimated link quality at each data rate and an analytical model of the energy consumption. Our model shows how the selected data rate depends on different channel conditions in order to minimize energy consumption. We have implemented RA-MAC in TinyOS for an off-the-shelf sensor platform (the TinyNode) on top of a state-of-the-art WSN Media Access Control Protocol, SCP-MAC, and evaluated its performance by comparing our implementation with the original SCP-MAC using both simulation and experiment.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2010 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.