MAC Layer Protocol Selection Mechanism for the Energy Efficient Cross Layer Protocol Design of Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the interconnected, large quantity of tiny wireless sensor nodes, deployed for specific monitoring and control purposes. It is hard and expensive to change or recharge the nodes, after deployment in harsh environments. Therefore, it is necessary for the efficient utilization of the energy of the available power in the tiny-sized battery of the sensors to extend the lifespan of the WSNs. To increase the lifespan, there are many protocols proposed in the literature that combines the Media Access Control (MAC) layer to the Network Layer (NL) for the cross layer design (CLD). The transceiver operations at the MAC layer cause most energy consumption, therefore, identifying a suitable MAC protocol for the cross layer scheme is more significant. In this connection, this paper proposes a mechanism to identify a suitable MAC protocol to be used with the NL protocol for the CLD. The simulations were conducted to compare the performance of the B-MAC, X-MAC, L-MAC, and IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocols using the OMNET++ tool. The performance of the protocols is evaluated in terms of energy consumption (EC), end-to-end delay (EED), and packets delivery count (PDC). The observation of the results shows that the IEEE 802.15.4 Carrier Sense Multiple Access/ Collision Avoidance (CSMA/ CA) based transmission scheme is more efficient in terms of energy, delay, and PDC. This protocol consumes at least 2.1 times less energy than other MAC protocols and improves the PDC by at least 1.97 times more than other MAC protocols and reduces the end-to-end delay by at least 35.5ms when compared to other MAC protocols.