| This thesis presents an agent-based system to minimize the energy consumption for border nodes in Sensor-Medium Access Control (S-MAC), a Cluster-based contention protocol. The S-MAC protocol is based on a unique feature; it conserves battery power at nodes by powering off nodes that are not actively transmitting or receiving packets. In doing so, nodes also turn off their radios. Inspired by the energy conservation mechanism of the S-MAC, The thesis further augments the node life time in sensor networks. Border nodes act as shared nodes between virtual clusters. Virtual clusters are formed on the basis of sleep/listen schedule of nodes. Towards this end, this thesis proposes a multi-agent system that allows border nodes to join a cluster where border nodes experience minimum energy drain. This system includes two types of agents: stationary and mobile agents. A prototype implementation and simulation results compared with S-MAC are presented. |
