Modeling the energy consumption of MAC schemes in wireless cluster-based sensor networks

The low-energy characteristics of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose a great design challenge for MAC protocol design. Recent studies have proposed different cluster-based MAC protocols. In [1], we proposed an intra-cluster communication bit-map-assisted (BMA) MAC protocol for cluster-based WSNs. BMA is intended for event-driven applications, where sensor nodes transmit data to the cluster head only if significant events are observed. In this paper, we develop energy consumption models for BMA, conventional TDMA, and energy efficient TDMA (E-TDMA) when used as intra-cluster MAC schemes. Using our analytical energy models, we compare these three MAC schemes in terms of energy efficiency. The results suggest that BMA is more suitable to large-scale wireless sensor networks. In addition, we demonstrate that BMA is a more bandwidth efficient MAC scheme with lower average packet latencies than the TDMA-based schemes.