Energy Efficient MAC with Variable Duty Cycle for Wireless Sensor Networks.

WSN consists of many sensors, they need high throughput and network lifetime to get involved in communication. Duty Cycle is a key factor in sensor nodes to maintain sleep, active condition in the presence of overhearing, collisions of packets while data transmission between sensor nodes. The key challenge of sensor nodes is to attain high energy efficiency, throughput and low End-End Delay. This paper presents several of existing approaches for MAC protocol. They are (1) Synchronization between nodes (2) Mathematical Analysis (3) TDMA based MAC and (4) Cross-Layer Design. We proposed a new method for MAC protocol with variable duty cycle. Neighboring nodes follow same duty cycle and same active time. Far away nodes doesn't maintain same duty cycle, hence their active time is not same. The duty cycle is maintained in synchronous way and adaptive manner among the nodes within the network. In this paper, a conventional MAC and proposed MAC are simulated using NS-2.35. Variable duty cycle approach in the proposed MAC with sleep and idle states for the nodes yields better throughput and energy efficiency with respect to other conventional technique. These results validate that the proposed variable DC-MAC is feasible for Wireless Sensor Network applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]