Energy-Efficient Battery-Aware MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks suffer from limited power resources. Therefore, managing the energy constraints and exploring new ways to minimize the power consumption during the operation of the nodes are critical issues. Conventional MAC protocols deal with this problem without considering the internal properties of the sensor nodes’ batteries. However, recent studies about battery modeling and behaviour showed that the pulsed discharge mechanism and the charge recovery effect may have a significant impact on wireless communication in terms of power saving. In this thesis we propose two battery-aware MAC protocols that take benefit of these factors to save more energy and to prolong the lifetime of the nodes/network without affecting the throughput. In both protocols we measure the remaining battery capacity of the node and use that measurement in the back-off scheme. The first protocol gives the nodes with higher remaining battery capacity more priority to access the medium, while the other one provides more medium access priority to the nodes with lower remaining battery capacity. The objective is to investigate, through simulations, which protocol reduces the power consumption of the nodes, improve the lifetime of the network, and compare the results with the CSMA-CA protocol.