Adaptive Quorum Based MAC Protocol in Non Uniform Node Distribution of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The lifetime of a sensor network depends mainly on the sensor node’s battery power. Therefore it is necessary to use sensor node battery power very efficiently. Most of the existing powers saving protocols have been designed in such a way that the sensor nodes are put into sleep state when there is no transmission. These protocols fail to adjust dynamically a sensor node’s sleep duration based on its traffic load. This periodic and regular sleep and awake method of these protocols cause high latency and high energy consumption. A host must be allowed to sleep longer if it is not involved in data transmission frequently. Thus, to efficiently manage a host’s energy, we need not only have a power saving mechanism but also a scheme to guarantee data transmission. In this paper we propose an Adaptive Quorum Based MAC Protocol (AQMAC) that enables sensor nodes to sleep under light loads in non uniform node distribution thereby decreasing the latency and increasing the throughput. We also used q-Switch Routing coupled with the non uniform node distribution strategy that switches the data flow among its corresponding next-hop forwarding nodes in order to balance energy dissipation among them and to reduce the transmission latency.