Lightweight Balanced Power Saving MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensors are battery powered devices which are attracting a tremendous attention owing to their wide range of applications. To overcome their intrinsic power limitations, reducing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a critical issue to expand their lifespan. Balancing nodes´ activities and duty cycling are efficient ways that could enhance WSN´s performances. Yet, most existing works only rely on these mechanisms to optimize energy consumption at MAC layer without taking into account the upper layers overhead. In this paper, we introduce a new power saving mechanism for wireless sensor networks that achieves cross-layer functioning to provide an adaptive duty cycle and a minimum routing overhead. This mechanism relies on two basic functions: an asynchronous duty cycling for nodes´ activity balancing and a lightweight geographic routing. We show through several simulations that our proposed approach outperforms existing works in terms of residual energy, energy consumption balancing and packets delivery ratio.