Cluster based energy-efficiency MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

An energy-efficient media access control protocol time division multiple access (TDMA) based energy aware (TBEA) for wireless sensor networks is presented. TBEA is based on the concept of grouping; it utilizes TDMA in inner-group communication and TDMA plus random backoff in inter-group communication. Meanwhile, it uses the concept of random sleep in order to decrease energy wastage due to idle listening. Motivated by the fact that it is very difficult to maintain synchronization in each node, a header node is used in each group to make sure that nodes which belong to the same group adjust their time according to the header node. Accordingly, a node is permitted to transmit only in its own slot. Furthermore, a header node can launch an election to vote for a new header in order to save its extra energy consumption. Simulation results explicitly show the energy gain in performance.