EMS-MAC: Energy Efficient Contention-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a key characteristic of modern wireless sensors. Assuming that the transceiver is the most power-consuming component of a typical sensor node, then a large advantage can be achieved at the data link layer where the medium access control (MAC) protocol controls the usage of the radio unit. Many MAC protocols have been developed for traditional wireless networks. Given that the sensor network is different from the traditional wireless network in many places, researchers are looking for a MAC protocol that is specifically designed and adapted to the sensor network. Moreover, most of the contributions in the wireless sensor network have assumed static nodes. However, some applications in the area of medical care and disaster response make use of the mobile sensor network. Thus, the present paper studies and simulates the sensor MAC (S-MAC), timeout MAC and mobility aware S-MAC(MS-MAC) protocols in terms of their energy efficiency in different mobility situations. Furthermore, an enhancement of the MS-MAC protocol, named as enhanced MS-MAC, is introduced and simulated. The results show that this enhancement can significantly improve the energy efficiency when there is a reasonable packet delivery rate.