mca 16(7): e2

Research Article

History-based MAC Protocol for Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks: the SLACK-MAC Protocol

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  • @ARTICLE{10.4108/eai.20-6-2016.151516,
    author={Affoua Th\^{e}r\'{e}se Aby and Alexandre Guitton and Pascal Lafourcade and Michel Misson},
    title={History-based MAC Protocol for Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks: the SLACK-MAC Protocol},
    journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Mobile Communications and Applications},
    volume={2},
    number={7},
    publisher={EAI},
    journal_a={MCA},
    year={2016},
    month={6},
    keywords={WSN; adaptive; asynchronous MAC protocol; duty-cycle},
    doi={10.4108/eai.20-6-2016.151516}
}
  • Affoua Thérèse Aby
    Alexandre Guitton
    Pascal Lafourcade
    Michel Misson
    Year: 2016
    History-based MAC Protocol for Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks: the SLACK-MAC Protocol
    MCA
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.20-6-2016.151516
Affoua Thérèse Aby1,2,*, Alexandre Guitton1,2, Pascal Lafourcade3,2, Michel Misson3,2
  • 1: Université Blaise Pascal, LIMOS, BP 10448, F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
  • 2: CNRS, UMR 6158, LIMOS, F-63173 Aubière, France
  • 3: Université d’Auvergne, LIMOS, BP 10448, F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
*Contact email: aby@sancy.univ-bpclermont.fr

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in environmental monitoring applications. They are designed to operate for several months by featuring low activity cycles in order to save energy. In this paper, we propose a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for suchWSNs with very low duty-cycles of 1% and less. Nodes are activated randomly and use a history of previous successful frame exchanges to decide their next activation time. We study the choice of the history size, and we compare the performance of our protocol with other protocols from the literature. We show by simulations and real experiments that with a limited history size of only six entries, our protocol achieves better performance than other protocols from the literature, while keeping the advantages of fully asynchronous protocols.

Keywords
WSN; adaptive; asynchronous MAC protocol; duty-cycle
Received
30th Sep 2015
Accepted
22nd Dec 2015
Published
20th Jun 2016
Publisher
EAI
http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/eai.20-6-2016.151516

Copyright © 2016 AffouaTherese Aby et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.20-6-2016.151516