TDMA based slotted medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology, which has a wide range of potential applications starting from surveillance to health monitoring. Sensor nodes in WSN are always power constraint as they are operated with batteries. Hence, it is prudent to design energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols for the WSN to improve the network lifetime. In this paper, an energy efficient MAC protocol for the wireless sensor network is proposed that allocate slots dynamically to minimize the idle states of the sensors. The proposed protocol assists each node to decide when and how to access the channel. The proposed idea is TDMA based and the slots are allocated efficiently based on the traffic loads and to maintain the fairness. In our protocol, energy efficiency is maintained by turning off the radio to sleep mode whenever necessary and at the same time maintains the synchronization. In the proposed method, best efforts are made to reduce energy wastage from various sources by adopting proper synchronization among the nodes and thereby improving energy efficiency.