Energy-efficient medium access control and routing protocol for multihop wireless sensor networks

This work presents a combined energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) and routing protocol for large-scale wireless sensor networks that aims to minimise energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. The proposed communication framework employs the following measures to enhance the network energy efficiency. Firstly, it provides an adaptive intra-cluster schedule to arbitrate media access of sensor nodes within a cluster, minimising idle listening on sensor nodes, leading to improved energy performance. Secondly, it proposes an on-demand source cross-layer routing protocol ensuring selection of best routes based on energy level and channel quality indicator for the multihop inter-cluster data transmission. Lastly, an unequal cluster size technique based on cluster head residual energy and distance away from the base station is utilised. This technique balances the energy among clusters and avoids early network partitioning. This work further presents the analytical performance model for energy consumption and delay of the proposed communication framework. The performance measures used for evaluation are energy consumption, delay, and network lifetime. The results indicate that combining routing and MAC schemes conserves energy better than utilising MAC scheme alone.