A Joint MAC and Routing Approach for Duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a new joint MAC and Routing Approach for duty-cycled sensor networks and designed a protocol called JBS (Joint MAC and routing protocol for Beacon-Saving), which achieves far larger network lifetime than conventional ones. Our proposal improves energy performance of receiver-initiated MAC protocols by combining it with routing functionality. In receiver-initiated MAC, leaf nodes of the delivery tree periodically transmit wasteful beacons even though no data frame will be received. So, we propose to omit transmitting beacons of leaf nodes to save the transmission power as well as the accompanying idle listening. As revealed in the past studies, reduction of idle listening has large effect on the energy performance. In our protocol, we build a delivery tree in a distributed manner such that the number of relay nodes are minimized, meaning that we maximize the number of leaf node. When residual battery power of some relay node becomes low, the delivery tree is recomposed so that every relay node in it is with sufficient residual power. Evaluation results show that the effect of our approach to combine routing functionality is far larger than the power saving effect of MAC only.