An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks for wide area large scale environmental monitoring

This Thesis presents a proposal for the development of a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks that is appropriate for environmental monitoring purposes. An energy aware MAC protocol is proposed for wireless sensor networks. This protocol saves energy by substantially reducing idle-listening. It is a reactive protocol which permits nodes to transmit packets every time they wake-up but at the same time proposes a mechanism to transmit packets that contain interesting data when nodes should not normally be awake.; The proposed protocol uses two techniques to reduce energy consumption for wide area large scale environmental monitoring applications. First, it uses a sleep/listen schedule in which nodes awake when a sample from the environment is taken. Second, it uses a mechanism through which a node that has urgent packets to send wakes up other nodes to convey data to Base Station fur further processing. This Thesis presents simulation results comparing proposed protocol against another existing protocol. Results show that proposed protocol achieves less energy consumption than the other protocol. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...